Why is my website so slow? Five common causes and fixes

People are impatient on their phones. If your website takes too long to show something useful, many visitors leave before they see your offer, and you never know they were there. The good news: most slow websites have the same handful of problems.

1. Huge images

Photos straight off a phone or camera can be several megabytes each. Resized and compressed properly, the same image looks identical on screen at a fraction of the size. This one fix often makes the biggest difference.

2. Too many plugins or add-ons

Every slider, chat widget and tracking script adds weight. Keep the ones that earn their place and remove the rest.

3. Cheap hosting

Very cheap hosting often means your site shares a crowded server. If your site is slow even when it's simple, the hosting may be the bottleneck.

4. Videos that load on arrival

Videos are great, but they should only load when someone is about to watch them, not the moment the page opens.

5. An old, bloated build

Older templates often load code for features you never use. Sometimes a lean rebuild is faster and cheaper than patching an old site forever.

How to check

Open your site on your phone using mobile data, not Wi-Fi. You can also test it with Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool. If the results aren't good, our winter "rebuild" package exists for exactly this.