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Journal · The Clarity Series · Performance

Why is my website so slow?

By Nicholas Cabel The 60-second version lives on Instagram

You click, you wait, you wait some more, and so does every customer. The truth is your site probably is not broken; it is carrying too much weight. Three usual suspects are almost always behind it, and all three are fixable.

In plain English

A slow website is like a delivery truck loaded past its limit. The engine is fine; it is just hauling far more than it should. Take off the excess weight and it moves the way it is supposed to.

Three usual suspects

01

Giant images

A single unoptimized photo can weigh several megabytes and drag the whole page down.

02

Plugin pile-up

Every add-on you bolt on adds more for the page to load before a visitor sees anything.

03

Cheap hosting

Shared, underpowered servers make even a lean site feel sluggish.

Worth remembering

32% more visitors leave when load time goes from one second to three.

Speed loss is customer loss, plain and simple. Those extra seconds do not just annoy people; they send a third of them away before they see what you offer.

What to do about it

The fixes, right-sizing images, trimming plugins, and better hosting, are usually straightforward. If your site feels slow, I can find out why fast: speed optimization is a service I offer, or start with a free audit.

About the author

  • Nicholas Cabel

    Written by

    Nicholas Cabel

    Founder of MakeAndUpdate, a one-person web studio in West Chester, PA. Hand-codes fast websites for local businesses and builds in public.

    @makeandupdate