People don’t wait for slow websites. If your pages take several seconds to appear, especially on a phone, some visitors leave before they ever see what you offer. Google notices too, and page speed is part of how it judges the experience your site gives.
Here are the causes we find most often, roughly in order of how easy they are to fix.
1. Huge images
A photo straight off a phone or camera can be several megabytes. Upload a dozen of those to a page and it will crawl. Images should be resized to the size they are shown at and compressed, and modern formats such as WebP make them smaller still.
2. No caching
Without caching, WordPress builds every page from scratch for every visitor. A good caching setup, either from your host or a single well-configured plugin, serves ready-made pages instead and can make a dramatic difference.
3. Too much on every page
Sliders, animations, chat widgets, tracking scripts and page builder features all add weight. Each one may be small, but together they add up. If a feature doesn’t help visitors do something, consider removing it.
4. An outdated PHP version
Newer versions of PHP, the language WordPress runs on, are noticeably faster than old ones. Many sites are still running versions that are years out of date, which costs both speed and security.
5. Hosting that can’t keep up
Cheap shared hosting puts your site on a server with many others. When a neighbor gets busy, your site slows down. If you’ve fixed everything above and the site is still slow, the hosting itself may be the bottleneck.
How to measure it
Free tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights show how your site performs on mobile and desktop, and what is slowing it down. Test a few different pages, not just the home page, and focus on the mobile results.
Not sure where to start? Ask for a free health check and we’ll include a speed check in your report.