Process
Why Your Website Feels Slow, and What Actually Fixes It
By the LA Web Design team6 min read
Speed is the one design problem customers feel before they can describe it. A page that takes four seconds to appear doesn't read as “slow website.” It reads as “this business seems unreliable,” and they're gone before they know why. Google measures it too, and it feeds into where you rank.
Start with images, because it's almost always images
The most common cause of a slow website is a photo straight off a phone or camera, uploaded at full size. A 6,000-pixel-wide image displayed in a 600-pixel-wide box still makes every visitor download the whole thing. Resizing images to the size they're actually shown, and saving them in a modern format, routinely cuts page weight by most of its total with no visible difference.
Then count the plugins
Every plugin adds code to every page, whether that page uses it or not. A website running thirty plugins to do the work of eight is carrying a lot of dead weight. Audit what's installed, remove what you stopped using, and replace the ones doing one small job with a few lines of custom code.
Cheap hosting is cheap for a reason
On bargain shared hosting your website sits on a server with hundreds of others and takes whatever resources are left over. When a neighbor gets busy, you get slow. If the website is doing real work for the business, hosting isn't the place to economize.
Fonts and third-party scripts
Every custom font is another file to download, and every third-party script — chat widgets, heat maps, ad pixels, review carousels — runs on the visitor's device. Keep two font weights, not six. Audit the scripts twice a year and delete the ones whose data nobody has looked at.
How fast is fast enough
Aim for the main content appearing in under two and a half seconds on a normal phone connection, and for the page to stop shifting around once it arrives. Google's PageSpeed Insights reports both numbers free. Test the pages people actually land on, not just the homepage.
The part most speed advice skips
A fast website that takes four taps to reach the phone number still loses. Speed buys attention; structure converts it. Fix the load time, then make sure the next thing the visitor needs is right there when the page shows up.