Why is my website slow — and how do I fix it?

How to measure it properly

Run your key pages through Google PageSpeed Insights. The most useful part is the field data at the top: it shows how real visitors on real devices experienced the page over the last few weeks, using the Core Web Vitals.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is how long the main content takes to appear; Google treats 2.5 seconds or less as good. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is how quickly the page responds to taps and clicks; 200 milliseconds or less is good. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is how much the page jumps around while loading; 0.1 or less is good.

Test on a phone over mobile data too. Most sites feel fine on the office Wi-Fi and struggle on a mid-range phone.

The usual causes

• Images uploaded straight from a camera or design tool, several times larger than the space they fill.
• Third-party scripts — chat widgets, trackers, embedded feeds, A/B testing tools — each downloading and running its own code.
• Web fonts loaded late, or many weights of a font that is barely used.
• Slow hosting, or a server far from your visitors with no content delivery network in front of it.
• Pages built entirely in JavaScript that show nothing until the whole bundle has downloaded and run.
• Plugins and page builders that add code to every page whether it is needed or not.

Fixes in the order we’d try them

• Resize and compress images, serve modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, and give each image its width and height so the layout doesn’t jump.
• Remove scripts you no longer use, and load the rest after the page is interactive.
• Put the site behind a CDN and set proper cache headers, so repeat visits and static files are near-instant.
• Self-host fonts, subset them to the characters you use and preload the one or two the first screen needs.
• Prerender or server-render pages so the HTML arrives with the content already in it.
• Only then look at the hosting plan or the platform itself.

Why it is worth the effort

Page experience is one of the signals Google uses for ranking, and slow pages lose visitors before they have seen anything. A fast site also simply feels more trustworthy — the same way a tidy shop front does.

Speed work also tends to tidy up the site: fewer scripts means fewer things that can break, leak data or need updating.

When a fix isn’t enough

If the site is built on a theme or page builder that loads everything everywhere, you can spend a long time fighting it. When the fixes above barely move the numbers, a rebuild on a lighter stack is often cheaper than another year of workarounds — see our guide on fixing or rebuilding legacy software for how to decide.

How SoftFix LLC can help

We start with an audit: real-user data, a list of what is slowing each key page down and a prioritised plan with effort for each fix. You can have us do the fixes, or hand the list to your own team.