You have seen the difference without thinking about it.

Some websites are simply there the moment you tap the link. Others show you a white screen, then a logo, then text that jumps around while a photo loads in behind it. By the time it settles, you have forgotten what you came for.

Your customers do the same thing on your site, and they do it silently. Nobody emails to say your website was slow. They just go back to the search results and tap the next one.

What actually makes a page slow

There are only four common causes, and almost every slow site we are asked to look at is one or two of them rather than something exotic.

Photographs straight from a camera or phone. This is the big one. A modern phone takes a picture around 4,000 pixels wide and three or four megabytes in size. On your website that photo is displayed in a space perhaps 600 pixels across. The browser still downloads all four megabytes, then shrinks it to fit. Ten such images on a page and you have asked your customer to download thirty megabytes to look at a shop front.

Fonts fetched from somewhere else. If your site loads its lettering from another company’s servers, the browser has to stop, ask that company for the file, and wait for an answer before it can draw any text. On a good connection this is invisible. On patchy mobile data in the middle of the day, it is the reason your page shows nothing at all for two seconds.

Plugins and add-ons nobody removed. A chat widget, a popup builder, three analytics scripts, a slider, a cookie banner from a different vendor. Each was added for a reason, each adds a little weight, and none of them were taken out when the reason expired. This is the most common problem on older WordPress sites, and it accumulates quietly.

The server thinking before it answers. Some sites build every page from scratch each time someone visits — looking things up in a database, assembling the result, then sending it. If the hosting is cheap and shared with hundreds of other sites, that thinking time can be most of the wait, before a single image is even requested.

The three numbers Google looks at

Google measures real visits to your site and reduces the experience to three figures. They are worth knowing because they are also a ranking signal.

How long until the biggest thing appears. Usually your main heading or hero image. Google wants this under 2.5 seconds. This is the number that photographs ruin.

How much the page jumps while loading. If you have ever gone to tap a button and had an advert push it out of the way at the last moment, you have experienced this. It happens when images and embeds have no space reserved for them, so everything shuffles as each one arrives.

How quickly it responds when tapped. Not how fast it loads — how fast it reacts. A page that has finished appearing but ignores your taps for half a second feels broken even though it looks finished.

You can see all three for any page with our free PageSpeed auditor. It reports what Google reports, and it costs nothing.

What to fix first, in order

Do not try to fix everything. On most sites the order is the same.

  1. Resize and compress your images. Nothing else comes close for effort-to-result. A photograph shown 600 pixels wide should be saved 600 to 1,200 pixels wide and well under 150KB. Our image optimizer does this in your browser, and we have written a step-by-step guide for it.
  2. Host your fonts on your own site. One request removed, and no dependency on another company being available.
  3. Remove plugins you cannot name a use for. If nobody remembers why it is there, it is not earning its weight.
  4. Then, and only then, consider hosting. People often start here because it feels like the technical answer. It is usually the smallest of the four.

Why “just make it faster” is the wrong instruction

If you hand a developer “make the site faster”, you will get a plugin that promises caching and a slightly better score. The site will still feel slow, because caching does not shrink a four-megabyte photograph.

Ask instead for the specific thing: what is the largest item on this page, and can it be smaller. That question has an answer, and the answer is checkable. Google’s own guidance on Core Web Vitals sets out how the measurements work, in more detail than most agencies will offer you.

There is also a limit worth stating plainly. Speed removes a reason to leave; it does not create a reason to buy. A page that appears instantly and says nothing useful will not sell anything. Getting under a second is worth doing because below that threshold people stop noticing the website at all and start reading what it says — which is the point.

Want us to look at it?

Send us the address of the page that worries you most. We will tell you which of the four causes above is yours, roughly what it would take to fix, and whether it is worth the money — even if the answer is that your site is fine and the problem is elsewhere.

Email hello@solvey.in or use the contact form. You will get a straight answer within one business day.