Bad page speed? The usual causes on a small business website and how to fix them

If Google PageSpeed Insights gave your site a low score, or your site just feels slow, the cause is almost always one of a few common page speed issues. You don't need to be technical to figure out which one.

First, check the right number

Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), paste in your site and look at the mobile score. Desktop scores are almost always higher and don't tell you much, since most of your visitors are on a phone.

• 90 to 100: fast, you're fine
• 50 to 89: needs work
• Under 50: bad page speed, and it's costing you visitors

The usual causes of slow page speed

Huge photos

This is the most common one by far. A photo straight off a phone can be 4 or 5 MB. Put ten of those on a homepage and a phone has to download 40 MB before the page looks right. Photos should be resized to the size they actually show on screen and saved in a modern format like WebP.

Too many plugins, apps and add-ons

Every chat widget, review slider, booking tool, popup and tracking script adds more code the phone has to download and run. One or two is fine. A lot of small business sites have ten or more, and some of them aren't even being used anymore.

A heavy template or page builder

Template builders and drag-and-drop page builders load a lot of code for features you're not using. That's a big reason template sites often score in the 30s to 60s on mobile while a site built from scratch can score in the 90s.

Cheap or overloaded hosting

A $3 a month shared hosting plan puts your site on a server with hundreds of others. When the server is slow to respond, everything after it is slow too. PageSpeed calls this "server response time" or "time to first byte."

Videos and sliders at the top of the page

An autoplay video or a big rotating slider right at the top is usually the heaviest thing on the page, and it's the first thing the phone tries to load.

Too many fonts

Every font style is another file to download. Some sites load four or five font families when one or two would do.

Quick fixes you can do yourself

• Resize and compress your photos before uploading them
• Delete plugins and apps you don't use
• Swap an autoplay video or slider at the top for a single good photo
• Remove old tracking codes from tools you stopped using

When it's time to rebuild instead

If you've done the easy stuff and your mobile score is still under 50, the problem is usually the platform itself. You can only make a heavy template so light. At that point a site built from scratch for speed is usually cheaper than paying someone to keep patching the old one.

Every site I build is made to load fast on a phone, and I test it with the same Google tool before it goes live.

Want to know what's slowing your site down? Get a free audit at n5studio.com/audit and I'll tell you the specific things hurting your speed and which ones matter most.