“The site is slow” is a judgement, not a number. Before paying anyone, it is worth knowing exactly how slow it is, what makes it slow, and what that is costing you. You can establish all three yourself in about fifteen minutes.
Measure first, do not guess
Your own computer opens the site quickly because the browser has already downloaded it. For a visitor the situation is different. Measure it the way a first-time visitor on a phone sees it.
Open PageSpeed Insights and enter your address. Look only at the mobile view, because that is where most traffic comes from. Three numbers matter:
- LCP. How long until the largest thing on screen appears. Under 2.5 seconds is good.
- CLS. How much content jumps around while loading. Under 0.1 is good.
- INP. How fast the page reacts to a click. Under 200 ms is good.
Write the three numbers down. When you start fixing things, you will have something to compare against.
Images are almost always the culprit
Most slow sites have the same cause: someone uploaded a photo straight off a phone and put it on the page. That file is often 4–8 MB. It is displayed 800 pixels wide.
Check it yourself: right-click the page, choose Inspect, open Network. Reload and sort by size. If the top row is an image over a megabyte, you have your answer.
Rule of thumb: no image on a page should be over 300 KB. Most manage at 100 KB without anyone noticing the difference.
The fix is dull and it works: resize the image to the size actually needed, save it as WebP, and add loading="lazy" to images below the fold. In most systems that is a couple of clicks away.
Too many third-party scripts
Every widget adds code that has to be fetched from somewhere else. A chat window, two analytics tools, a heatmap, a popup, a social widget and three tracking pixels. Each one looks small. Together they are often half the load time.
Make a list of everything added to your site. Next to each line, write who looked at that data in the last month. Anything you cannot name can come off.
A font that blocks the text
If a site loads a custom font incorrectly, the text stays invisible for a moment. The visitor stares at an empty screen even though the text has already arrived.
The fix is one line: the font declaration needs font-display: swap. A normal system font shows first and the real one swaps in when it lands. The visitor can start reading immediately.
What it actually costs you
A slow site is not a technical detail, it is a financial loss that happens to be hard to see. Someone who leaves before the page opens never appears in any of your statistics. They simply do not come back.
If you are buying traffic with advertising, the loss is double: you paid for the click and lost the person before they saw anything. The same budget produces more enquiries simply because fewer people vanish in between.
What you can do today
The order that gives the most result for the least effort:
- Measure with PageSpeed Insights and write down the three numbers.
- Find the three largest images and make them smaller.
- Remove every widget whose data nobody looks at.
- Check that the font has font-display: swap.
- Measure again and compare.
If all four are done and the number is still bad, the problem is deeper: the platform itself, the server, or how the page is built. That is when it is worth bringing someone in. But start with the simple things, because that is usually where the answer is.
If you would rather someone walked through this with you
Book a free 30-minute call. We look at what you have now and tell you honestly whether there is anything to gain here. If there is not, you hear it on the call, not three days later in a proposal.