Why is my website slow?

By Charlie B, Deliberate Design.

The short answer: it is probably the photos. Phone cameras make four megabyte images and people upload them straight to the page, so a visitor on a bus downloads twenty megabytes to see a menu. After photos, the causes are page builders, plugins, cheap hosting and embedded things.

Check it

Put your address into Google's PageSpeed Insights, free, and look at the mobile score and the list underneath. It names the big files.

The five causes

• Photos. Resize to the width they are shown at, usually under 1600 pixels, and save as JPEG or WebP. A page's photos together should be under a megabyte or two
• The builder. Wix, Squarespace and WordPress page builders load their own code on every page
• Plugins. On WordPress, each one adds something. Sites with thirty plugins are slow by design
• Hosting. The cheapest shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one machine
• Embeds. YouTube, Instagram feeds, chat widgets and maps each pull in a lot. One map is fine; four embeds is not

Quick fixes

1. Resize the photos. This alone fixes most slow small sites
2. Remove embeds you do not need
3. Remove plugins you do not use

Why it matters

Visitors on phones leave slow pages. Google measures speed and ranks faster pages higher. A fast page also feels like a business that has its act together.

Ours

Plain pages with no builder running on them, photos resized before they go on the page, and no embeds except a map. They load in well under a second on a phone.