A slow website is one of those problems that's easy to ignore — until you realise it's quietly costing you customers and search rankings. Here's what usually causes it, whether it actually matters (spoiler: yes), and how to diagnose it before you spend money.
Does speed actually matter?
Two reasons it does:
- Conversions. Every extra second of load time loses visitors. People bounce off slow pages, especially on mobile.
- Rankings. Google uses page speed (via Core Web Vitals) as a ranking signal. Slow sites rank lower, all else equal — which is why it's on my technical SEO checklist.
So it's not vanity. Slow = fewer customers and lower visibility.
Common causes
Most slowness comes down to a handful of culprits:
- Huge images. The single most common cause — uncompressed photos many times larger than they need to be.
- Too many plugins/scripts. Especially on WordPress; each one adds weight, and marketing tags/trackers pile up fast.
- Cheap or overloaded hosting. Bargain shared hosting can throttle you.
- No caching. Rebuilding every page from scratch on every visit instead of serving a ready-made copy.
- Bloated themes. Multi-purpose themes that load code for features you don't use.
- Render-blocking resources. Scripts and styles that stop the page showing until they finish loading.
How to diagnose it
Before paying anyone, run your site through a free tool:
- Google PageSpeed Insights — gives you Core Web Vitals and specific recommendations
- Your browser's built-in performance tools
These usually point straight at the culprit — oversized images, a slow script, no caching. A "good" score isn't about chasing 100/100; it's about the page feeling fast to a real user on a phone.
What to fix first
- Compress and correctly size images — often the biggest single win, and cheap
- Add caching
- Cut unnecessary plugins/scripts and tracking tags
- Review hosting if the basics don't fix it
- Then get into the finer render-blocking and code-level tuning
The first three fix the majority of slow small-business sites.
When to get help
If you've compressed the images, added caching, and it's still sluggish, the problem is deeper — code, architecture or hosting — and worth a professional look. Speed is baked into every site I build; see my website design page.
Site feeling slow and not sure why? Book a free call and I'll help you find the bottleneck.