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Is Your Website Too Slow? How to Speed Up a Small Business Website
A slow website loses customers and can hold you back on Google. How to test your website's speed for free, what the scores mean and the fixes that help most.
When someone taps on your website from Google, you have a few seconds before they get bored and go back. A slow website annoys people and costs you enquiries.
Speed problems on small business websites usually come from the same few causes.
Step 1: Test your website
Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), type in your web address and run the test. Look at the mobile results, because that’s how most of your customers visit.
You’ll see a score out of 100 and three measures Google calls Core Web Vitals:
| Measure | What it checks | Google’s “good” target |
|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | How long the main content takes to appear | 2.5 seconds or less |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | How quickly the page responds when you tap something | 200 milliseconds or less |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | How much things jump around while loading | 0.1 or less |
Don’t worry too much about getting 100. Aim to pass all three.
Step 2: Fix the most common problems
Huge images
This is the number one cause. A photo straight from a phone can be several megabytes. On a website it usually only needs to be a fraction of that.
- Resize images to the size they’re actually shown
- Save them in a modern format like WebP
- Use a free tool like Squoosh to shrink them before uploading
Too many plugins, apps and add-ons
Every chat widget, slider, pop-up, social feed and tracking script adds weight. Go through them and remove anything you don’t really need.
Heavy themes and page builders
Some themes and drag-and-drop builders load lots of code on every page, even code you don’t use. If your site is very slow and nothing else helps, the theme or builder may be the cause.
Cheap or overloaded hosting
Very cheap shared hosting can be slow, especially at busy times. Better hosting often makes an instant difference.
Big videos and animations
Background videos and fancy animations look nice but slow things down, especially on phones. Use them sparingly.
Step 3: Check it on a real phone
Scores are useful, but also test your site the way a customer would. Use your phone on mobile data, not Wi-Fi. Does it load quickly? Can you tap the call button easily? Does anything jump around?
Why our websites are fast
We build websites with very little code and no unnecessary plugins, so pages load quickly even on a weak phone signal. Images are compressed and the hosting is built for speed. It’s one of the reasons we build sites the way we do. Read why bespoke beats off-the-shelf for more.
Want to know what’s slowing your site down?
Book a free website check and we’ll test your site’s speed and tell you exactly what’s slowing it down. If it needs a rebuild, see our website design service.
