Website is slow
Your website is slow. Here is how to find out why.
Slow to start and slow to finish are two different faults. Work through this in order and you will know whether it is your images, your plugins, or your host.
Answer these first
- Slow for everyone, or only you? Try a phone with Wi-Fi off.
- Every page, or one page? One slow page is a content problem.
- Always slow, or since a certain date? Something was installed that week.
- Slow to start, or slow to finish drawing?
The checks, in order
Measure time to first byte
TTFB is how long the server takes to send anything. Under about 600ms is healthy. Consistently over a second, even on simple pages, points at the host or the database.
Load the page twice
If the second load isn't much faster than the first, there is no page cache. That is one of the cheapest fixes there is.
Find the heaviest file
The speed test lists the biggest assets. A multi-megabyte photo straight off a phone is the most common cause we see. If the page is over about 2MB and most of it is images, you found it.
Count the requests
A page loading 90 scripts and stylesheets is slow even if each is tiny. Page builders, sliders, and half-used plugins each add their own.
Test on a phone on cell data
Most people finding a local business are on a phone. If it is unusable there, that is the site most customers get.
The usual causes
Most slow sites have two or three of these at once.
Images never resized
Most commonSigns: Single photos over about 300KB.
Fix: Resize to the displayed size, save as WebP, set width and height, and lazy-load below the fold.
Plugin bloat
Very commonSigns: Dozens of CSS and JS files on the home page.
Fix: Turn off anything you can't name a use for, one at a time. Swap a heavy slider for one image.
No caching
Very commonSigns: The second load is as slow as the first.
Fix: Turn on page caching. On WordPress that is usually the biggest single improvement.
Overloaded shared hosting
CommonSigns: TTFB over a second even on cached pages.
Fix: Move to a host or plan with real resources. You can't fix this from inside WordPress.
Third-party scripts
CommonSigns: Chat widgets, two analytics tags, ad pixels, and remote fonts.
Fix: Remove duplicates, self-host fonts, and load chat on click.
Questions
What do Core Web Vitals measure?
Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the main content draws (good is 2.5 seconds or less). Interaction to Next Paint: how fast the page responds to a tap (good is 200ms or less). Cumulative Layout Shift: how much the page jumps while loading (good is 0.1 or less).
Should I aim for a PageSpeed score of 100?
No. The lab score is one simulated device. The field data from real visitors is what Google uses, and a site can be fast for real people with a lab score in the 70s.
Will moving hosts make my site faster?
Only if the problem is a slow server. A 4MB photo and forty plugins move with you. Measure TTFB first.
Can you diagnose it without a login?
Yes. Everything on this page can be measured from outside. I only need access to fix it.
Send me the URL.
I will tell you which of these it is, what it takes to fix, and which parts you could do yourself.