My site is slow — what usually causes it?

Slow sites are usually slow for one or two specific reasons, not everything at once. The trick is measuring before you change anything.

Measure first

Run the page through our site audit tool or Google PageSpeed Insights, on mobile, since that is how Google judges it. Note the Core Web Vitals: LCP (loading), CLS (layout shift) and INP (responsiveness).

The usual culprits

• Huge images. A 4MB photo dropped straight from a phone is the single most common cause. Images should be resized to the space they fill and served in a modern format.
• Too many plugins (WordPress). Each one adds code to every page load. Twenty active plugins is a warning sign.
• Render-blocking scripts. Third-party embeds, chat widgets, tag managers and font loaders that hold up the page while they load.
• Slow server response. Cheap shared hosting under load, or a site with no caching, so every visit rebuilds the page from scratch.
• No caching or CDN. Assets served from one location, rebuilt every time, instead of cached and served from the edge.

What to do

Fix the biggest contributor first. For most sites that is images, then caching, then trimming scripts. A full rebuild is rarely necessary, most sites have three or four fixable problems.

If you would rather someone just sort it, we do speed optimisation as a fixed piece of work.