Why your website is slow and how to speed it up

A slow website is usually down to weak hosting, oversized images, too many plugins and no caching. It's rarely one culprit, and a page that takes 5 seconds to load loses visitors before they see anything.

Weak hosting

This is the most common cause and the easiest to fix. On a cheap shared plan with hundreds of sites on one machine, your speed depends on the neighbours. Old spinning disks versus NVMe make a big difference for databases. And without server-side caching, every visit builds the page from scratch.

It's also the cheapest win: moving to NVMe hosting with LiteSpeed can cut load time noticeably without changing anything on the site. We've seen it many times.

Oversized images

A 4 MB photo uploaded straight from a phone weighs down the whole page. Resize it to the size you actually display and save it as WebP. On WordPress, an image optimization plugin does most of this work for you.

Too many plugins

Each plugin loads its own CSS and JavaScript. Twenty plugins mean twenty brakes. "All-in-one" themes packed with options you never use slow things down too. Keep only what you use.

No caching and no CDN

With caching on the server and in the browser, the page isn't rebuilt on every visit. A CDN serves your site from closer to visitors in other countries, so it loads faster for them.

I'd start with hosting, since that's where the biggest gain is, then move to images and plugins. If you'd rather not deal with the hosting part, we'll move your site for free, usually without any downtime.