Website speed gets discussed as though it were a technical setting somebody forgot to switch on. It is nearly always simpler than that. A slow page is usually a heavy page, and the weight is usually in a small number of places that are straightforward to find.
It is worth being clear about why it matters before getting into the fixes, because "speed is important" on its own is the kind of advice that leads to spending money in the wrong place.
What "slow" means to the person waiting
A visitor is not timing your page. They are experiencing three separate things, and it helps to keep them apart:
- When something appears. A blank white screen for two seconds feels considerably longer than it is.
- When the main thing appears. Usually the big image or the heading at the top. The industry name for this is largest contentful paint — the moment the biggest item on screen has actually finished arriving.
- Whether it stays still. If a page renders and then jumps as an image or advert loads above what you were reading, that is layout shift. It is the reason people tap the wrong thing, and it annoys visitors more than a slow load does.
The condition to judge all this in is a phone on mobile data, not a desktop on office broadband. That is where most visits to a small business website come from, and it is where the gap between a light page and a heavy one is widest.
The causes, roughly in order of how much they matter
Images that are far larger than they are displayed. This is the big one, and on most websites it accounts for the majority of the weight. A photograph off a modern phone can be four or five megabytes and be shown on the page at the size of a business card. The browser downloads all of it and then shrinks it. Resizing images to roughly the size they are shown, saving them at sensible quality, and using a modern format such as WebP will often take a page from several megabytes to a few hundred kilobytes without any visible difference.
Things loaded from other companies. Every chat widget, analytics tag, review badge, tracking pixel, map embed and font service is a separate request to a separate company's servers, and your page is waiting on all of them. Each one seemed small when it was added. Six of them are not small. This tends to accumulate over years rather than arriving all at once.
Web fonts. A custom font has to be downloaded before text can be shown in it, so either the text is invisible for a moment or it appears in one font and then swaps. Two font files is normal, and eight — which happens easily once you count bold and italic variants — is worth revisiting.
Video that plays automatically. A background video can be tens of megabytes, and it is usually the single heaviest thing on a page. If it is there, it wants to be a deliberate choice rather than a default.
No caching. Caching tells a browser it can keep the logo and stylesheet rather than re-downloading them on every page. It is a server setting and costs nothing, and it makes every visit after the first one considerably quicker.
Before paying for anything, get someone to check the image sizes on your busiest pages. On a large proportion of websites that one job accounts for most of the available improvement, and it does not touch the design.
How to measure it without misleading yourself
Google's PageSpeed Insights is free, needs nothing installed, and will test any public web address. Two things are worth knowing before you read the result.
First, it gives you two kinds of data. Lab data is a simulated test run on the spot, and it is what produces the score out of 100. Field data, where it is available, is drawn from real visits by real people, and it is the more honest of the two. If your field data looks fine, your website is fine, whatever the score says.
Second, the score is a rough summary and not the objective. Chasing 100 out of 100 on a small business website is a poor use of money — the last twenty points typically cost more than the first sixty and are not noticed by anybody. A page that shows something useful within a couple of seconds on a phone is the target.
Run your homepage and your main service page through PageSpeed Insights and look at the list of opportunities rather than the number. The list is specific and usually short, and it will name the actual files causing the problem.
What I would do first, in order
- Resize the images. Nearly always the largest win available, and the least disruptive.
- Remove anything third-party you are not using. Old tracking tags and abandoned widgets are common and cost nothing to take out.
- Turn on caching and compression. Server settings, usually a few minutes' work for whoever manages the hosting.
- Reduce the font files to the weights you actually use, and set them to show text immediately rather than waiting.
- Reserve space for images so the page does not jump as they load. This fixes layout shift without changing anything visible.
- Then, and only then, consider whether the underlying build is the problem. Sometimes it is. It is worth ruling out the five cheap answers before concluding it.
A note on rebuilding
Speed is often used as the argument for a rebuild, and occasionally it is the right one — a page carrying a heavy builder and a stack of plugins has a floor below which it will not go. But that is a conclusion to reach after the list above, not before it. I have seen websites go from uncomfortable to perfectly quick on an afternoon of image work, and it would have been easy to sell a rebuild instead.
If you want the broader picture of what a website has to get right, that is in what a small business website actually needs. Speed also shows up in the monthly SEO Management crawl, alongside the on-page issues, so it gets picked up as it drifts rather than only when somebody complains.