Try this: open your company website on your phone, using mobile data and not the office Wi-Fi, and count the seconds until you see the main headline. That's what most of your visitors see. If it takes a long time, many of them will close the page and go back to the search results.
How does Google measure your website's speed?
With three metrics called Core Web Vitals, collected from real visitors' browsers:
| Metric | What it measures | Good value |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | When the largest element on the page appears, such as the main image or headline | 2.5 seconds or less |
| INP | How long the page takes to respond when the visitor taps | 200 milliseconds or less |
| CLS | How much elements move and jump around while loading | 0.1 or less |
Open PageSpeed Insights and enter your homepage URL, then a service page. If you see the section "Discover what your real users are experiencing", those are the numbers that count. The lab result below it is useful for finding the causes.
What usually slows websites down?
Images come first. A main photo of several megabytes, taken with a camera and uploaded as it was, is enough on its own to delay the page by seconds. Next come external scripts: chat widgets, tracking, maps and videos that all load before the visitor sees anything. Then fonts, when the page loads entire font families in every weight from an external server. And on WordPress sites, lots of plugins, each adding its own files to every page.
What should you fix first?
- ImagesWebP or AVIF format, dimensions sized to the screen, and lazy loading for anything below the fold
- ScriptsRemove what you don't use, and defer the rest until after the content appears
- FontsHost them on your own site, and load only the weights you use
- CachingCompress files and cache them in the visitor's browser
- ServerA recent PHP version and hosting that isn't overcrowded
This order reflects what we see on most sites, and yours may differ. So start by measuring, and fix whatever shows up in your own report first.
Why do page elements jump around while loading?
Usually because images don't have set dimensions, so the browser reserves a small space for them and then pushes the text down when they arrive. Or because an ad or a notification bar suddenly appears at the top of the page. Set the width and height for every image, and reserve a fixed space for any element that loads later.
Is your hosting the cause of the slowness? How can you tell?
Look at the server response time, which reports show as TTFB, the time until the first part of the page reaches the browser. If that time is long, the problem starts before images and scripts come into it: an overloaded server, a slow database, or a site that builds every page from scratch on every visit with no caching. If the server is far from your visitors geographically, every request travels a longer distance, and that's where a content delivery network (CDN) helps by keeping copies of your site's files close to the visitor.
If the response is fast and the page is still slow, moving hosts won't change much, and the fix lies in the page itself. The PageSpeed Insights report lists server response time among the lab results, so you don't need another tool to know where to start. If you do decide to move, read how to choose web hosting.
Does website speed affect your Google ranking?
It does, though less than many people think. Google uses Core Web Vitals among its page experience signals, and it still puts the most relevant page for the search first even if that page is a little slower. Speed has its biggest effect on visitor behavior: many people close a slow page before it finishes loading, and visitors from paid ads leave the same way. So aim for all three metrics to be in the good range for your real visitors, and don't get hung up on scoring 100 in the testing tool.
How do you speed up a WordPress site without rebuilding it?
Most of the slow WordPress sites we review can be improved a lot before a rebuild is worth considering. Take a backup first, then work through these points one at a time, measuring after each step so you know which one made the difference:
- Delete plugins you don't use, and check what each remaining one loads on pages that don't need it.
- Turn on one good caching plugin, and don't combine two plugins that do the same thing.
- Compress existing images and convert them to WebP, and set sensible dimensions for new images when you upload them.
- Update the PHP version from your hosting panel after trying it on a staging copy, since some older plugins stop working with newer versions.
- If the theme is a multipurpose one built on a heavy page builder, you may quickly reach the limit of what can be improved.
When is a rebuild the answer?
If your site was built with a heavy tool and dozens of plugins, you may spend a long time patching it. For company websites whose content changes rarely, a static site built from lightweight HTML files is much faster and less exposed to hacking. This site is an example, and its pages load no external scripts at all.
Send us your website link through our contact page and we'll send you the three biggest causes of slowness on it. To see how we build websites, read about our website design and development service.
Questions our partners ask
Which tool should I use to measure speed?
Google's PageSpeed Insights, which is free. Look first at the real-user data section if it appears, since it matters more than the lab score.
Will changing my hosting fix the slowness?
Sometimes, if the server is slow to respond. Most of the slowness we see, though, comes from heavy images and too many scripts on the page itself, and those stay with you on any host.
Written by the Visual Innovate team, the people who build, host and follow up systems, websites and apps for our clients in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Egypt.
