Why is mywebsite slow?
A slow site loses people before they see a thing. Here is what slow actually means, what usually causes it, and the few changes that make the biggest difference, with the words to use with your developer.
What slow means
Google measures speed the way a visitor feels it, on real phones and computers. Three things count most:
- How soon the main thing appears. The biggest picture or block of text should be on screen within 2.5 seconds. Over 4 seconds is poor.
- How quickly it reacts. When someone taps a button, something should happen within a fifth of a second.
- How still it stays. The page should not jump about as it loads.
Before any of that, the server has to answer at all. Google's own guide suggests it should start answering within 0.8 seconds. If it takes longer, everything else is late too.
Why it matters
Small delays add up to real money. In a study for Google, Deloitte found that making mobile sites just a tenth of a second faster raised sales by 8.4% for shops and 10.1% for travel sites.
Most of your visitors are probably on a phone, often on a patchy signal, so a page that feels fine on the office wifi can feel very slow to them.
The usual causes
On small business sites, it is nearly always one of these:
- A slow first answer. The server builds every page from scratch for every visitor, often on cheap shared hosting.
- Big pictures. A photo straight off a camera can be ten times larger than it needs to be.
- Too many scripts. Every plugin, chat bubble, tracker and slider adds code the phone has to download and run.
- Lots of other websites. Fonts, maps, videos and adverts each come from somewhere else, and each one is another connection to make.
- Pictures with no size set. The browser does not know how much room to leave, so the page jumps when they arrive.
What makes the biggest difference
A few changes do most of the work, and none of them means a new website:
- Caching. The server keeps a ready made copy of each page instead of building it every time. Ask: “Is page caching turned on, and is the server answering in under a second?”
- Smaller pictures. Resize them to the size they are shown at, and save them as WebP. Ask: “Can you resize and compress our pictures, and do it automatically for new ones?”
- Fewer plugins and scripts. Remove what nobody uses. Ask: “Which plugins and scripts could we remove without losing anything we need?”
- Sizes on pictures. Ask: “Can every picture have its width and height set, so the page does not jump?”
- Better hosting. If caching is on and it is still slow, the hosting may be the problem. It is often a small monthly difference.
How Mendbird helps
The free check times how long your server takes to answer, weighs the page, counts its scripts and the other websites it pulls in, and finds pictures with no size set. Each one comes with the words to send your developer.
On a Watch plan it does this every morning, so if a new plugin or a hosting change slows the site down, you see it in your report the next day rather than months later.
We check from one place, so for how real visitors experience your site, look at the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console. It is free and uses data from people's own phones.