Guide / performance
Why your website is slow.
A slow site costs twice: some people leave before seeing anything, and search engines treat speed as one quality signal. The good news is that in practice the culprits are few and repeat themselves.
Images, almost always
The most common cause is photos uploaded straight from a camera or phone: multi-megabyte files displayed in a box a few hundred pixels wide. The browser still downloads all of it. Simply preparing images at a sensible size and in a modern format changes how a site feels more than almost any other single change.
Too many add-ons
Every plugin, chat widget, map, review badge, ad pixel and consent banner adds something. Individually each looks small; together they can outweigh the rest of the page. It is worth asking periodically which of them are actually used.
Hosting chosen by price, not by need
The cheapest shared hosting can be fine for a small brochure site and clearly insufficient for a store. If the site is slow even when nothing is happening on it, the problem often sits below the content.
What to measure, and what not to over-value
Watch how quickly the main content appears and whether the page jumps around while loading. Do not chase a perfect tool score at all costs — a hundred points on a page with no images and no features is not a business achievement.
Frequently asked questions
Does speed really affect Google rankings?
It does, as one signal among many. It affects how many people stay far more — and that shows up in sales before it shows up in rankings.
It is fast for me but customers complain. Why?
Because you have it cached and usually a better connection. Test on a phone, on mobile data, with the cache cleared — that is closer to your customer's reality.