Speed matters twice: people leave pages that keep them waiting, and Google uses page experience as one of the signals it ranks by. The good news is that most slow business sites are slow for the same handful of reasons.
What Google measures
Google’s Core Web Vitals boil speed down to three things a visitor feels:
- Largest Contentful Paint — how long until the main thing on the page shows. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint — how quickly the page reacts when you tap something. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift — how much the page jumps around as it loads. Aim for under 0.1.
Test on a phone setting, not a desktop: that’s where most local searches happen, and where slow sites struggle most.
1. Huge images
The most common cause by far. A photo straight off a camera can be 5 MB; on a web page it rarely needs to be more than 200 KB. Resize images to the size they’re shown at, save them in a modern format like WebP, and let images further down the page load only when they’re needed.
2. Too many plugins and scripts
Every slider, chat widget, social feed and tracking script adds code each visitor must download and run. On WordPress, ten plugins that each add “just a little” add up. Remove what you don’t use; our site audit lists everything your pages load from other sites.
3. Slow or overloaded hosting
If your server takes over a second just to start answering, nothing else can make up for it. Cheap shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one machine. Server response time is in every health check; if it’s slow, better hosting or caching is the fix.
4. No caching
Without caching, many sites rebuild every page from the database for every visitor. A caching plugin or server cache serves a ready-made copy instead, often making pages several times faster.
5. Fonts and layout shifts
Web fonts that load late make text flash or jump; images without set sizes push content down as they appear. Both hurt Layout Shift and feel clumsy. Set image dimensions and load fonts with a fallback.
Where to start
Measure first, so you fix what actually matters. A health check runs Google’s Lighthouse on a phone and a desktop and lists the biggest wins in order — or ask for a free report.