Images that were never resized
A 4000 px photo straight from the camera shown in a 400 px box. Modern formats cut the weight by more than half without visible loss, and resizing the file is free.
Guide — Web performance
Why your website is slow ✦
It is almost never the hosting. It is usually the weight of what you are sending to a phone on mobile data, and it is measurable in an afternoon.
/ Causes
The usual suspects
In order of how often we find each one when a client says the site feels slow on a phone.
A page builder on top of a CMS
Builders add code you did not ask for, and plugins add more. Each one is a few hundred kilobytes and a few extra requests.
Too many fonts and weights
Three families and six weights means downloading a lot of text you barely use. Two well-chosen fonts are usually enough.
Videos and maps loading by default
An embedded video or map downloads before anyone asks for it. Load them on click and the first screen gets much lighter.
/ Diagnosis
Find the real cause first
Test on a phone, on mobile data, not on office wifi. Most of your visitors are not on your wifi. The difference between the two is the whole problem.
Measure the weight of the first screen. Page builders and image tools report total kilobytes and requests. If the first screen is over a few hundred kilobytes, that is the cause, not the server.
Watch the biggest files. Sort the request list by size. Fixing the three biggest files usually changes more than a month of server tuning.
Test before and after every change. Otherwise you cannot tell what helped. A speed number without a comparison is a guess.
/ What matters
Speed is part of the offer
Fast is not a technical award. It shows up in the numbers you already care about.
Fewer people leave before reading
Every extra second of waiting is people who never see your services, your prices or your contact button.
Better use of ad budget
A slow destination page makes every click more expensive, because you pay for visitors who leave before the page loads.
A better impression
A site that responds immediately feels more professional than one that stalls, even if the design is simpler.
Repair or rebuild
Sometimes the fastest path is a light rebuild instead of patching a builder stack. That is a scope decision, and it is worth explaining in writing.
/ Keep reading
Read next
Speed, measurement and the decisions behind them.
Usually not. Hosting matters when the server is slow to respond, but most slow sites we see are heavy in the browser: images, scripts and fonts. Check that first, it is cheaper.
It can, if the rebuild removes weight instead of adding a new stack on top. A redesign that keeps the same images and the same plugin pile will not change much.
The useful measure is how quickly the first screen becomes readable on a phone with mobile data. Under a couple of seconds feels instant; beyond four seconds, visitors start leaving.
Yes. We can look at the weight, the images and the scripts and tell you what we see. If the fix is small, it is said plainly instead of being turned into a project.
Next step
Let's talk about
Let's talk about
your project
Tell us what isn't working. We'll answer with what we'd do, what it costs and how long it takes.