Website slow? Practical ways to speed it up, and why it matters

For your visitors

A visitor who is waiting is a visitor who might leave. Slow pages also make forms, menus and buttons feel unresponsive, which makes people less confident about getting in touch. For a business that relies on enquiries, every page that loads slowly is a small barrier between a potential customer and a phone call.

For search

Google measures real-world page experience through a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals (opens in a new tab). In its Search Central documentation (opens in a new tab), Google recommends that site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals, saying they align with what its core ranking systems seek to reward.

Guessing wastes time. Start by measuring, so you know what is actually slow and can tell whether your changes helped. These tools are free.

• PageSpeed Insights (opens in a new tab) tests a single page and shows both lab results and, where Google has enough data, how real visitors experienced it.
• The Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console (opens in a new tab) groups pages across your whole site that need attention.
• Your own phone. Open your site on mobile data, not Wi-Fi, and note how long it takes before you can read and tap things.

The three Core Web Vitals in plain English

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is how quickly the main content, often a large image or heading, appears. web.dev suggests aiming for 2.5 seconds or less.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. The suggested target is 200 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is how much the page jumps around while loading. The suggested target is 0.1 or less.

These targets come from web.dev's guidance on Web Vitals (opens in a new tab), which measures them at the 75th percentile of page loads. Test your most important pages first: the home page, key service pages and your contact page.

1. Images

On many small-business sites, images are the single biggest cause of slow pages. A photo straight from a phone or camera can be many times larger than it needs to be.

• Resize images to the largest size they are actually displayed at.
• Compress them, and use modern formats such as WebP or AVIF where your site supports them.
• Lazy-load images further down the page, so they only load when needed.
• Give images a width and height so the page does not jump as they load, which helps CLS.
• Do not lazy-load the main image at the top of the page; it should load as early as possible.

2. Third-party scripts and plugins

Chat widgets, tracking tags, pop-ups, social feeds and sliders all add code that the visitor's phone has to download and run. Each may seem small, but together they often slow pages down and make them less responsive.

• List every script and plugin on the site, and remove anything you no longer use.
• Ask whether each remaining one earns its place. An auto-playing slider rarely does.
• Load non-essential scripts after the main content, rather than before it.

3. Fonts

Custom fonts make a brand look polished, but loading many font families and weights adds weight. Limit yourself to the styles you actually use, and make sure text stays visible while fonts load.

4. Caching and a content delivery network

Caching lets returning visitors reuse files they have already downloaded, and lets the server avoid rebuilding the same page again and again. A content delivery network (CDN) serves files from locations closer to the visitor. Both are usually configured by your developer or hosting provider.

5. Hosting

If the server itself is slow to respond, everything else waits. Very cheap shared hosting can struggle when your site, or other sites on the same server, gets busy. If tests consistently show a slow server response, it may be time to review your hosting, ideally with servers reasonably close to your customers.

6. Bloated themes and page builders

Some ready-made themes and page builders load a lot of code for features you are not using. Sometimes careful clean-up is enough; sometimes a rebuild on a lighter foundation is the more sensible long-term option. That decision depends on the site and is worth discussing with a developer.

Websites tend to slow down over time as new images, plugins and tracking codes are added. Make speed part of every change: before anything new goes live, ask what it adds to the page and whether it is worth it. A quick test after each change, and a fuller check every few months, keeps problems from building up.

Speed is one part of a wider search picture. If you are planning broader SEO work, read how long SEO takes and what to expect in the first 90 days. You can also see how we approach performance in our FAQ on websites.