Visitors on phones won’t wait long for a page to appear. A slow site also makes a business look less cared for, even when the work behind it is excellent. The good news is that most slow sites have the same few causes.
1. Images that are too large
This is the most common cause by far. A photo straight from a phone or camera can be many times bigger than it needs to be. Resize images to the width they’re shown at, and use a modern format such as WebP. Most sites get noticeably faster from this alone.
2. Too many plugins or add-ons
Every plugin, chat widget, tracking script and font adds something to load. Go through them and remove anything you no longer use. Ask of each one: what does this do for my customers?
3. Hosting that doesn’t fit the site
Low-cost shared hosting can be fine for a small brochure site, but it often struggles once a site has booking, forms or more traffic. If your site is slow even after the fixes above, the hosting is the next place to look.
4. No caching
Caching stores ready-made copies of your pages so they don’t have to be built from scratch for every visitor. Most good hosts and many website platforms include it. Make sure it’s switched on.
How to check your own site
- Open your site on your phone, on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi, and see how long the first screen takes.
- Run your homepage through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. Focus on the suggestions it marks as the biggest opportunities, not on the score itself.
- Check again after each change, so you know what helped.
What not to worry about
You don’t need a perfect score. A site that loads its first screen quickly on a phone and responds when people tap is doing its job. Spend your effort on what visitors actually feel.