5 things slowing down your business website, and how to fix them

Your site probably feels fast to you. You open it on your laptop, on your own wifi, in a browser that’s been holding a copy of it since Tuesday.

Your customer opens it on a three-year-old phone, on spotty signal, from a Google result, having never been there before. That’s a different website.

Most of the gap comes down to five things, and four of them you can fix yourself this afternoon.

Measure first, or you’re guessing

Run your homepage and your busiest page through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It’s free and you don’t need an account. Look at the mobile tab, not desktop; that’s where your customers actually are and where the problems show up.

Two numbers are worth understanding:

• Server response time (sometimes labeled TTFB): how long the server takes to send back anything at all. This is your floor. Nothing you do on the page can make the site faster than this.
• Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the biggest thing on screen, usually your hero image, finishes loading. Under 2.5 seconds is the target.

Write both down before you change anything. You’ll want something to compare against.

1. Your images are enormous

This is the most common cause by a wide margin, and the easiest thing on this list to fix.

A photo straight off a modern phone is 4,000 pixels wide and several megabytes. Your site displays it in a column maybe 800 pixels wide. WordPress does shrink the display size, but on a lot of themes and page builders the visitor’s browser still downloads a far bigger file than it needs. Ten of those on a homepage and you’ve got a page that weighs more than a video.

What to do:

• Resize before you upload. Roughly twice the display width is plenty. That’s 1,600 to 2,000 pixels for a full-width hero, and less for anything in a sidebar.
• Save as WebP if your tools offer it. Same picture, usually about a third smaller.
• Turn on lazy loading so images below the fold wait until someone scrolls to them. Modern WordPress does this by default, but page builders sometimes override it.
• Skip the background video. It’s the heaviest thing most small sites carry, and almost nobody watches it.

PageSpeed lists your worst offenders by filename under “Properly size images.” Start at the top of that list and stop when it stops complaining.

2. Plugins you forgot you installed

Every active plugin is code that runs on every page load, whether you’re using it or not. The slider you tried once, the second contact form plugin, the analytics tool you replaced but never deleted.

The count matters less than you’d think. Plenty of fast sites run 25 plugins. Slow sites usually have two or three heavy ones dragging everything down, and the only way to find them is to test. Back up first, then deactivate one plugin, retest, note the number, turn it back on. Tedious, but it takes twenty minutes and it’s the only method that tells you the truth about your site. Anything you’ve had deactivated for months, delete outright. Dormant plugins still get exploited.

The related culprit is scripts you added by hand: the chat widget, the tracking pixels, the embedded map, fonts pulled from two different services. Each one is a request to somebody else’s server, which means you inherit their bad day. If you can’t name what a script does for your business, remove it and see if anyone notices.

3. Your site rebuilds every page from scratch, for every visitor

WordPress doesn’t store your pages as finished pages. It assembles each one on request. It queries the database, runs your theme and plugins, and hands over the result. It does this again for the next visitor, and the next, even though the page hasn’t changed since March.

Caching saves the finished page and hands out copies. It’s usually the single biggest speed win on a WordPress site, and it’s a toggle, not a project.

Check your host’s dashboard first, since many include page caching and some have it on already. If yours doesn’t, a caching plugin will do it. One caching plugin, though. Running two is a classic way to end up with a site that serves stale pages and a very confusing afternoon.

One habit worth building: after you edit a page, clear the cache. Otherwise you’ll swear your changes didn’t save while your visitors see the new version just fine.

4. You’re running an old version of PHP

PHP is the programming language WordPress is written in, and your host decides which version your site runs on. Old versions are slower, and once a version stops getting security updates, running it means running unpatched code on a site your business depends on.

Moving from PHP 7.x to 8.x usually makes WordPress noticeably faster, and it costs you nothing but the time to test.

To check: in WordPress, go to Tools → Site Health → Info → Server. Your host’s control panel will show it too, and usually let you change it there. If you’re on anything starting with 7, you’re overdue.

Before you switch: take a backup, then move up one version at a time and click through the parts of your site that matter: the contact form, checkout, booking widget, the admin screens you use daily. If something breaks, it’s almost always a plugin that hasn’t been updated in years, which was already a problem you had.

5. The server underneath all of it

If your server response time is slow, everything above is rearranging furniture. Compressed images won’t help if the server takes 1.8 seconds to answer the door.

Budget shared hosting packs hundreds of sites, sometimes thousands, onto one machine. They all draw from the same processor and the same memory. When a neighbor gets a traffic spike or runs something clumsy, your site slows down with it, and you can’t see why, because you can’t see the neighbors.

How to tell this is your problem: the response time stays bad after you’ve fixed the page itself, or your site is fine at 6am and sluggish at 2pm. Inconsistency is the tell. Your own site doesn’t change hour to hour. Your neighbors do.

Don’t jump straight to switching hosts. Ask yours what’s going on, and if you’re on a plan that’s been stacking up sites for four years, ask what they’d recommend. But if you’ve done the first four things and the floor is still the floor, hosting is the answer, and no plugin is going to save you from it.

(Fair disclosure: I write these guides for Sitery, which is container-based hosting. Every site runs in its own isolated container instead of sharing one big pile of files and processes with hundreds of neighbors. That’s our answer to this particular problem, and I’d rather tell you plainly than pretend I don’t have a stake in it.)

Where to start

If you only have an hour: compress your images and turn on caching. That’s most of the win for most sites, and neither one costs anything.

Then check your PHP version, since it’s a two-minute look and occasionally a free speedup. Save the plugin audit for a slow week. It’s the most tedious item here and rarely the biggest.

And re-measure when you’re done. After an afternoon of work, everyone is sure the site feels faster. The numbers will tell you whether it actually does.

If you worked through the list and the server is still your slow spot, you can set up a Sitery account and see how your site runs in its own container. There’s no teaser rate that jumps at renewal, and when you write in, a real person answers.

June