How to tell if your website is really slow
Open PageSpeed Insights, paste in your web address and give it a minute. It's Google's free tool, and it tests your site the way an ordinary phone on an ordinary connection sees it, not the way you see it on the shop computer with fibre.
You'll get a score from 0 to 100 and a wall of numbers. Don't panic. On the Mobile tab, look at just three things:
| What it measures | What it means | Good if… |
|---|---|---|
| LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) | How long the main thing takes to appear: the big photo or the headline | under 2.5 seconds |
| INP (Interaction to Next Paint) | How long the page takes to react when you tap a button | under 200 milliseconds |
| CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) | Whether things jump around while the page loads | under 0.1 |
If all three are green, your site isn't slow and the problem is somewhere else. If they're red, read on.
A tip: test your competitors' sites too. If theirs loads in half the time, you know who customers are comparing you with when they can't decide between the two of you.
The five causes we see over and over
1. Huge photos
This is the number one cause, by a long way. You upload a photo straight from your phone (4,000 pixels wide, 5 MB) and the site shows it in a space 800 pixels wide. The browser downloads all 5 MB anyway.
A photo properly prepared for the web weighs 100 to 300 KB. With ten photos on your home page, that's a huge difference. On a phone with patchy 4G, even more so.
2. Too many plugins
Classic WordPress: one plugin for the contact form, one for the slider, one for cookies, one for SEO, one for the gallery… Each adds its own code, its own styles and sometimes its own database queries. Twenty plugins isn't unusual. Half of them aren't even used, but they still load.
3. Page builders (Elementor, Divi, Wix…)
They let you build a site by dragging blocks around, and that comes at a price: they generate far more code than needed so that everything works with any design. They're not bad tools. They're built to make sites easy to create, not fast to load.
4. Cheap hosting
€2–3-a-month shared hosting packs hundreds of sites onto the same server. When the site next door gets a spike in traffic, yours feels it. In PageSpeed it shows up as a slow server response time ("Reduce initial server response time").
5. Third-party extras
The chat bubble in the corner, the Facebook pixel, the embedded Google map, the Instagram widget, three different analytics tools… Each one loads from someone else's server, and your site waits for them to finish. Often nobody remembers why they were added.
What to fix first
You don't need a new website to notice the difference. In order of effort:
- Compress your photos. Convert them to WebP at the size they're actually shown. A free tool like Squoosh lets you do it yourself. This is usually the change you'll notice most.
- Remove what you don't use. Deactivated plugins, forgotten widgets, the chat nobody answers. What isn't there doesn't slow you down.
- Review third-party tools. If you've got three analytics tools, keep one. The Google map can load only when someone clicks on it.
- Switch hosting if your server takes more than half a second to respond. This is where it's worth getting help.
- Consider a new site if it's still red after all that. Sometimes the foundations are the problem: a heavy theme with a page builder on top and twenty plugins can't be patched into shape.
Our view: if your site is more than five years old, built with a page builder and looked after by "a friend, when they get a chance", it usually works out cheaper to start again than to keep patching. If it's fairly recent, the first three steps are often enough.
Why it matters (and not just for Google)
Google uses these same metrics as one of the signals for ranking results. It's not the most important one, but between two similar sites, the fast one has the edge.
What matters most, though, is the person looking you up on their phone, out on the street, wanting to book. If your site is slow to show your phone number or the booking button, there's a good chance they'll hit back and tap the next result. You won't see it in any report. That customer just never turns up.