5 reasons your website loads slowly.

A customer will never write to tell you they left because the page would not open. They simply go back to the search results and click the next link. That is the most expensive way to lose a customer, because you never even learn it happened. Below are the five things that most often slow company websites down, ordered from the ones you can fix yourself in an hour to the one that needs a rebuild.

1. Photos straight from the camera

By far the most common cause, and the easiest to remove. The photographer sends a file 6000 pixels wide and eight megabytes heavy, somebody drops it into the gallery, and the customer's browser downloads all eight megabytes in order to show an image 800 pixels wide. Ten photos like that on the home page and you have 80 megabytes to download.

What to do: photos should be saved as WebP or AVIF, at no higher resolution than the size they are displayed at, and served in several variants so a phone does not download the version prepared for a monitor. In Next.js the Image component does this automatically. On WordPress you need a plugin for it, which is another piece of code with a cost of its own.

2. A dozen plugins, three of which you use

Every plugin adds its code to every page, including the ones where it is never used. The slider plugin loads its scripts on the contact page too, where there is no slider at all. The contact form pulls in its own library, which is often a copy of something the site already has.

What to do: go through the list and switch off everything you are not deliberately using. It can be painful, because you often discover that half the site's features rest on plugins nobody updates any more. If that is the case, speed is the least of your worries.

3. Hosting that costs five pounds a year

On shared hosting your site sits on one server with hundreds of others. If a neighbour gets a spike in traffic, you slow down. It is the most underrated line in the budget: you save a hundred a year and lose customers whose value runs into thousands.

What to do: check how long the server itself takes to answer, before the browser starts drawing anything. If that is hundreds of milliseconds, the problem is the hosting, not the photos. It is also worth checking where the server physically sits: if your customers are in Poland and the server is in Texas, every request carries a delay before it even starts.

4. Marketing scripts stacked up over the years

Analytics, the Facebook pixel, a chat widget, a heatmap, a newsletter pop-up, a cookie banner. Each looks innocent on its own, but each connects to an outside server you have no control over. When that server slows down, your site slows down with it. It is insidious precisely because the site itself is fine, and the customer waits anyway.

What to do: list every script and, for each one, answer who last used its data and when. A heatmap installed two years ago for a single campaign is usually still there, and still costing you.

5. A template that has to do everything

This is the cause that optimisation cannot fix, which is why I left it until last. A marketplace theme is sold to thousands of companies at once, so it has to serve a restaurant, a law firm and a gym. All of that code travels to your customer's browser, even if you use one of the fifty layouts on offer.

What to do: nothing, short of a rebuild. You can compress the photos and cut the plugins, but you cannot throw out the template's surplus code, because you do not know which part of it you are actually using. A site written from scratch carries only the code it needs, and that is where most of the difference comes from.

What speed actually changes

Let me be honest: a fast site will not push you to the top of Google. Speed is one signal among many, and nobody serious will sell you rankings bundled with an optimisation. It works the other way round: a slow site takes away the traffic you already have. A customer who clicked your link and leaves before seeing anything is a loss you had already paid for, in SEO or in ads.

If you are not sure which of these five applies to your site, write to me. I will go through it and tell you plainly what can be fixed in a few hours and what needs a rebuild - including when the answer is “leave it alone, it is not worth it”.