Why is my website slow, and does it matter?
Almost all slow websites are slow for the same four reasons: oversized images, render-blocking fonts, too many third-party scripts, and layout that shifts while loading. You can check yours for free in about two minutes with Google PageSpeed Insights. The first two are usually fixable in a morning; the third requires deciding what you can live without.
Last reviewed 9 August 2026
Does speed genuinely matter, or is it an upsell?
It genuinely matters, though not always as dramatically as it is sold. Two separate things are affected.
The first is people. A visitor waiting on a blank screen on a phone, on mobile data, in a shop doorway, will leave, and they will not tell you they did. This is the real cost, and it is invisible in a way that makes it easy to ignore.
The second is search. Google uses page experience signals, including loading speed and visual stability, as part of how it ranks pages. It is not the biggest factor, relevance and authority matter more, but it is a genuine one, and it is unusual in being almost entirely within your control.
The four causes, in the order you will find them
In our experience nearly every slow site we are asked to look at has at least two of these.
- Images far larger than the space they appear in. A photograph straight from a phone can be several megabytes and four thousand pixels wide, displayed in a box six hundred pixels across. This is the single most common cause and the easiest to fix.
- Fonts that block rendering. The browser has the text and refuses to show it until the font file arrives. The page sits blank for no reason a visitor can understand.
- Third-party scripts. Chat widgets, analytics, tracking pixels, embedded videos, cookie banners, review widgets, booking embeds. Each was added by a different person for a good reason, each loads code from someone else's server, and nobody has ever removed one.
- Layout that shifts while loading. Text appears, then an image arrives above it and pushes everything down as you are reading. It reads as cheapness even to people who could not describe what happened, and it makes people tap the wrong thing.
How to check yours, free, in two minutes
Open Google PageSpeed Insights and enter your address. Read the mobile score, not the desktop one, desktop flatters almost every site and is not where your visitors are.
Two numbers matter more than the overall score. Largest Contentful Paint is how long until the main content appears; under 2.5 seconds is the target. Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much the page jumps about while loading; under 0.1 is the target.
Ignore the overall score as a target in itself. A site can score in the nineties and still feel slow to a real person on a bad connection, and chasing the last few points is where money gets wasted.
Which fixes are worth paying for
Roughly in order of return per pound.
- Resizing and compressing images, and serving modern formats. Cheap, fast, and usually the largest single improvement available.
- Fixing font loading so text appears immediately rather than waiting. A small change with a disproportionate effect on how fast the site feels.
- Auditing third-party scripts and removing what nobody uses. Free, and frequently the second biggest win. Ask what each one is for; some will have no answer.
- Reserving space for images and embeds so nothing jumps. Straightforward, and fixes the most irritating symptom.
- Caching and a content delivery network. Worth it, though often already handled by decent hosting.
- Rebuilding the site. Only when the platform itself is the problem, typically a page builder with a stack of plugins, where each individual fix is fighting the tool.
When speed is not your problem
A caveat, because performance is easy to sell and satisfying to measure.
If your site gets thirty visitors a month, the reason you have no enquiries is not that the page takes 3.1 seconds instead of 2.4. It is that nobody knows the site exists. Speed work compounds the value of traffic you already have; it does not create traffic.
Fix speed when you have visitors and they are not converting, or when the site is genuinely painful on a phone. If the problem is that nobody arrives, the work is in search, local listings and being present where your customers already are.
What we hold our own pages to
Since this is easy to preach and harder to practise: every page on this site is measured automatically before it can be published, and the build fails if a page is too slow or shifts too much while loading. At the time of writing the worst page on the site measures a Largest Contentful Paint in the low hundreds of milliseconds and effectively zero layout shift. Those are lab measurements on a fast connection rather than field data from real visitors, and we would rather say so than present them as the same thing.
Common questions
What is a good PageSpeed score?
Above 90 on mobile is genuinely good, 50 to 90 is normal and usually improvable, and below 50 means something specific is wrong rather than the site merely being unoptimised. But treat the score as a diagnostic rather than a target, the individual metrics tell you what to fix, and the score does not.
Will a faster site definitely improve my Google ranking?
Not on its own. Speed is one signal among many, and it will not outrank a competitor with genuinely better content and more authority. It is worth doing because it affects whether visitors stay, and because it is one of the few ranking factors entirely in your control.
My host says the site is fast. It does not feel fast.
Hosts typically measure how quickly their server responds, which is one small part of what a visitor experiences. Everything after that, images, fonts, scripts, rendering, happens in the browser and is not the host's to measure. Test with PageSpeed Insights on mobile and you will see the difference.
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