Why your website is slow — and the three fixes that matter

A customer opens your site on 3G, somewhere between Embu and Nairobi. They wait. Three seconds pass. They leave. You never find out they were there.

Almost every slow site I open has the same three problems, in the same order. None of them need a new server.

1. The pictures are far too big

This is the big one. A photo straight from a phone camera is often 4 or 5 MB. On the page it appears the size of a postcard, but the visitor still downloads the whole thing. Ten of those on a homepage and the page weighs more than a short video.

The fix is boring and very effective: resize images to the size they are actually displayed, save them in a modern format like WebP, and let images below the fold load only when the visitor scrolls to them. On the sites we rebuild, this alone usually cuts load time in half.

2. Plugins you stopped using

On WordPress sites I regularly find twenty-plus plugins, of which maybe six are in use. Each one can add its own stylesheet and script to every page — including pages that never use the feature. A slider plugin loads on your contact page. A shop plugin loads on your about page.

Open the plugin list and be honest about what earns its place. Deactivate, test, delete. Keep security and backup plugins. Question everything else.

3. Fonts and third-party scripts

Four font families with six weights each is a surprising amount of downloading. So is a chat widget, two analytics tools, a pixel from an ad platform you tried once, and an embedded map on every page.

Pick two font families. Load only the weights you use. Keep analytics. Remove anything you are not actively reading reports from. Embed the map on the contact page only.

How to find out what is actually wrong

Do not guess. Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights and read the "Opportunities" list. Then open your site in Chrome, press F12, go to the Network tab and reload. Sort by size. The biggest rows are your problem, in order.

Two numbers matter more than the overall score: how long until the main content appears, and how much the page jumps around while loading. A visitor forgives a slow score. They do not forgive tapping a button that moves.

What "fast enough" means

On a good connection, aim for the main content within two seconds. On a slow mobile connection, under five. A simple business site with compressed images and no unnecessary scripts will hit that on modest shared hosting — which is why hosting is usually the last thing to change, not the first.

If you would like us to check your site, we do a free health check: speed, mobile behaviour, broken links and whether the site is actually bringing you enquiries.