Guides · · 5 min read
Why your website is slow and how to tell if it is costing you customers
A slow website gives no warning: people leave before it loads and all you see is that the phone does not ring. This guide explains what usually makes a website slow, how to measure it with free tools and what can be fixed without rebuilding it.
What slowness costs you without you seeing it
When someone searches for a workshop in Durango or a clinic in Bilbao, they open your website on their phone, often on a poor connection. If the page takes too long, they close it and open the next one on the list. Nobody tells you; the enquiry simply never arrives.
Google takes it into account as well. It measures the loading experience with what it calls Core Web Vitals: how long the main content takes to appear, how long the page takes to respond when you tap something and how much it shifts around while loading. A website that fails those measures starts at a disadvantage against one that passes them.
A slow website is also usually a symptom of other things: hosting that is barely adequate, accumulated plugins, unoptimised images. Fixing speed tends to improve security and maintenance too.
The most common causes
Images come first. Photos uploaded straight from the camera, neither resized nor compressed, weigh more than the whole page put together. The fix is to serve each image at the size it is displayed, in a modern format, and to load it only when it is about to be seen.
Plugins and scripts come second. Every extension added to the content manager, every chat widget, every embedded map and every tracking tool loads its own code. Over the years they pile up, and many are no longer used.
Fonts come third and go unnoticed. Loading several families in several weights from an external server delays the moment the text appears. With one or two families, hosted on your own domain and only in the weights you need, the text shows up straight away.
And then hosting. A cheap shared server responds late when it is under load, and everything else waits. You do not need an expensive server; you need an adequate one, properly configured, with caching and compression.
How to check it yourself, for free
Open PageSpeed Insights, Google's free tool, paste your website's address and wait for the result. It gives you a score for mobile and another for desktop, the Core Web Vitals measures and a list of what should be fixed, ordered by impact.
Look at the mobile result first, because that is the one that matters. If the measures are red or orange, you have work to do. Pay attention to the sections on images, on code that blocks loading and on server response time: that is where almost everything usually is.
Test it on your own phone as well, on mobile data rather than wifi, on the home page and on the contact page. If you find yourself waiting, your customers wait longer.
What the demo's weight calculator shows
On the SEO and performance page there is a Google simulator with a weight and speed calculator. You move three controls, images, scripts and fonts, and see how long the page would take on a phone with a 4G connection. It is indicative, but it shows something that is hard to see any other way: how every extra megabyte turns into seconds of waiting.
Try pushing images to the maximum and you will see why they are the first cause. Then bring scripts and fonts down and you will see how much room there is without touching the design. That is exactly the conversation we have when we review a website: what is surplus, what can be reduced and what stays.
You can try it in the demo before asking us for anything. It will give you an idea of where your website stands and what is realistic to improve.
What can be fixed without rebuilding the website
Many slow websites can be rescued without changing the design: optimise the existing images, remove plugins that are no longer used, reduce the fonts, switch on caching and compression and, if necessary, change hosting. They are concrete jobs, with a measurable before and after.
Other times the website is built in such a way that every fix is a patch. If the content manager is loaded with extensions and the design depends on them, it can be more cost-effective to rebuild it on a light base and keep it that way.
The sensible thing is to measure first. Send us your address through the form and we will tell you what is going on, what can be fixed on what you have and what cannot. And if the website is already fine and only needs to stay that way, a care plan does precisely that.
Frequently asked questions
Does a slow website affect my ranking?
Yes. Google measures the loading experience with Core Web Vitals and uses it as one of the factors for ordering results, especially on mobile.
Can a WordPress website be made faster?
In most cases, yes: images, plugins, fonts, caching and hosting. If the base is too heavy, we will tell you before starting.
How often should speed be checked?
Every time you change something significant on the website and, on a regular basis, as part of maintenance. The care plans include a periodic performance review.
Does this sound like your case?
Tell us about it through the form or at web@golkosystems.com and we will tell you where to start.