Is Your Website Slow? Speed Problems That Cost You Customers

Measure first

Enter your site’s address in Google PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile result in particular. According to Google’s Core Web Vitals, a good page should:

• Show its main content in under 2.5 seconds (LCP)
• Respond to clicks and taps in under 200 milliseconds (INP)
• Not shift around while loading (CLS below 0.1)

The most common causes of slowness

These are the most common problems on slow sites:

• Large images that are not compressed or resized for phones
• Heavy templates and dozens of plugins
• Code and libraries loaded on every page but never used
• No caching
• Underpowered or badly configured hosting
• Lots of third-party scripts: live chat, social widgets, ad trackers

How to build a fast site

Speed is not a feature you add later; it is a decision you make at the start. A site built on a modern stack that loads only the code it needs, serves images in the right size and format (WebP, AVIF) automatically, and pre-renders pages and serves them from cache will be fast even on an inexpensive server.

Speed up the current site or rebuild it?

If the problem is a few large images or missing caching, the current site can be sped up with a few fixes. But if the slowness is in the foundations (a heavy template, a pile of plugins, an outdated stack), every fix is temporary. In that case, rebuilding on a solid foundation is cheaper in the long run.