To speed up your website, test it first, then fix the biggest causes in order: oversized images, too many plugins or scripts, and slow hosting. On most small business sites, images alone are the largest part of the problem, and fixing them can halve the load time.
A slow site costs you customers. People on a phone with patchy signal won’t wait, and Google takes page speed into account when it ranks results.
Test it properly first
Go to Google’s PageSpeed Insights, paste in your web address and run it. Look at the mobile result first, because that’s where most of your visitors are.
You’ll get a score out of 100 and three measurements Google calls Core Web Vitals:
| Measurement | What it means | Good |
|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | How long until the main content appears | 2.5 seconds or less |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | How quickly the page reacts when tapped | 200 milliseconds or less |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | How much things jump around as it loads | 0.1 or less |
Below the scores, PageSpeed lists what’s slowing the page down. That list is your to-do list.
The usual causes, and how to fix them
1. Images that are far too big
A photo straight off a phone can be 4,000 pixels wide and several megabytes. Your website shows it maybe 1,200 pixels wide. Visitors download the whole thing anyway.
Fix: resize images to the size they’re shown, compress them, and use a modern format like WebP. I’ve written a separate guide on how to optimise images for your website.
2. Too many plugins, apps or scripts
Every chat widget, tracking code, social feed, pop-up and slider adds code the phone has to download and run. On WordPress, twenty plugins is not unusual, and each can add its own files to every page.
Fix: list everything on the site and remove what you don’t use. Be ruthless with anything that only “might be useful”.
3. Cheap or overloaded hosting
The server your site lives on has to respond before anything else can happen. Very cheap shared hosting can be slow to answer, especially at busy times.
Fix: check the “server response time” line in PageSpeed. If it’s consistently slow, better hosting is the fix, and it’s often only a few pounds a month more.
4. No caching
Without caching, the server rebuilds each page from scratch for every visitor. With it, a ready-made copy is sent instantly.
Fix: on WordPress, a reputable caching plugin or host-level caching. Most website builders handle this for you.
5. Autoplaying video and big sliders
A full-width video or a five-image slider at the top of the page is often the single heaviest thing on it, and it’s the first thing the phone has to load.
Fix: replace the slider with one strong image. If you keep a video, make sure it doesn’t load until it’s needed.
6. Heavy fonts
Four or five font styles from an outside service can hold up the text.
Fix: stick to one or two fonts and only the weights you actually use.
If your site is on WordPress
WordPress can be fast, but it’s easy to make it slow. The biggest wins are usually: fewer plugins, a lighter theme (heavy “page builder” themes are common culprits), a caching plugin, image optimisation, and keeping everything updated.
If your site is on Wix or Squarespace
You have less control, because the platform decides much of the code. What you can do: compress images before uploading, remove apps you don’t use, avoid autoplaying video and animations, and keep pages focused rather than very long.
Quick check. Run your home page and your most important service page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. If either scores below 50, the list of fixes underneath will show you where to start.
When to stop fixing and rebuild
If a site scores poorly on every page, is built on a heavy theme you can’t change, and fixes only move the needle a few points, the cheaper long-term answer is often a lighter rebuild. That’s a judgement call, and it depends on what else the site needs. Slow hosting is often part of it too: my hosting runs on NVMe and LiteSpeed servers in the UK.
The free website check runs Google’s speed test on your site, on mobile and desktop, and explains the results in plain English. It’s a good first step before you change anything.
