Website loading slowly
A slow website does two things you do not want. It frustrates visitors, most of whom will leave before the page finishes loading, and it signals to Google that the experience on your site is poor, which affects your rankings. The good news is that the majority of speed problems on smaller sites come from a small number of causes, and most of them can be fixed without touching any code.
Find out how slow your site actually is
Before fixing anything, measure the problem. Go to PageSpeed Insights and enter your URL. It is free, takes about 30 seconds, and gives you a score for both mobile and desktop along with a list of specific issues to address. Run it on your homepage and on any other pages that matter, like your main service page or a key blog post. The report will tell you exactly what is slowing things down so you are not guessing.
Large images are the most common cause
This is responsible for the majority of speed problems on smaller sites. If you uploaded images straight from your phone or camera without resizing them first, those files are likely far larger than they need to be for a web page.
A photograph taken on a modern phone can be 5 to 10 megabytes. The same image displayed on a webpage only needs to be 100 to 300 kilobytes. That difference in file size is the difference between a page that loads in one second and one that takes eight.
Before uploading any image, resize it to the actual dimensions it will be displayed at on the page and compress it. A free tool like Squoosh at squoosh.app lets you do this in the browser without installing anything. Upload your image, reduce the dimensions to no wider than 1200 pixels for most uses, and drop the quality to around 80 percent. You will barely notice a visual difference but the file size will be a fraction of the original.
For images already on your site, go back through your pages and replace oversized files with compressed versions.
Use the right image format
The format you save images in also affects file size. JPEG works well for photographs. PNG is better for logos or images with transparent backgrounds. WebP is a newer format that produces smaller file sizes than both JPEG and PNG for similar quality and is supported by all modern browsers. If your website builder allows you to upload WebP files, use them.
Some builders automatically convert images to WebP when you upload them. Check your builder’s documentation to find out whether this is handled for you.
Too many third-party scripts
Every tool you add to your site that loads from an external server adds time to your page load. This includes live chat widgets, cookie banners, marketing pixels, social media embeds, font libraries, and analytics scripts. Each one makes a separate request to an external server when your page loads, and if any of those servers are slow to respond, your page waits.
Go through your site settings and remove any third-party tools you no longer use or do not actually need. If you have added a Facebook pixel, a Hotjar script, a live chat tool, and three font libraries and you only actively use one of them, removing the others will have a noticeable impact on load time.
Web fonts can slow things down
If your site uses a custom font loaded from Google Fonts or another external service, it adds an external request to every page load. This is usually a small impact but if you are loading several font weights and styles that you do not actually use on the page, it adds up.
Check how many font variants you are loading. If your builder or theme loads a font in six different weights but your site only uses two of them, reduce the number of variants being requested. If your builder has an option to host fonts locally rather than loading them from an external server, that is worth enabling.
Your hosting might be the problem
If your images are optimised, your scripts are minimal, and your PageSpeed score is still poor, the issue may be your hosting. Budget shared hosting puts many websites on the same server and when that server gets busy, every site on it slows down.
This is more relevant if your site is on traditional hosting rather than a modern website builder. Builders like Webflow, Wix Studio, and Framer handle their own infrastructure and generally perform well without you needing to think about it. If you are on WordPress with shared hosting and consistently seeing slow load times despite optimising your content, moving to a faster host or a managed WordPress host is worth considering.
Core Web Vitals
Google measures page speed through a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals. The three main ones are Largest Contentful Paint, which measures how long it takes for the main content of a page to load; Cumulative Layout Shift, which measures how much the page jumps around as it loads; and Interaction to Next Paint, which measures how quickly the page responds when someone clicks or taps something.
PageSpeed Insights shows your scores for all three. The most commonly failed metric on smaller sites is Largest Contentful Paint, which is usually caused by a large hero image or a slow server response time. Fixing your image sizes as described above will improve this score significantly for most sites.
Layout shift, where elements move around as the page loads, is usually caused by images that do not have their dimensions specified in the code, or by fonts loading after the text has already appeared. If your builder generates the code automatically this is less likely to be an issue, but it is worth checking your CLS score in PageSpeed Insights.
How fast should your site be
As a practical target, aim for your pages to load the main content within 2.5 seconds on a standard mobile connection. PageSpeed Insights will tell you your current Largest Contentful Paint time and flag it as good, needs improvement, or poor. Most small sites with unoptimised images fail this metric and pass it easily once images are compressed.
A score of 90 or above in PageSpeed Insights is considered good. Most new sites on modern builders start somewhere between 60 and 80 and reach 90 or above with image optimisation alone.