thinkwithgoogle.com<\/a>)<\/p>\nIf your site feels sluggish, it’s usually not one big problem. It’s a handful of small ones stacked on top of each other. Here are ten that come up again and again, even on sites built by experienced developers.<\/p>\n
1. Images that are too big for the web<\/h2>\n
This is the most common cause of a slow site, by a wide margin. A photo straight from a phone or camera can be 4-8 MB. A web page doesn’t need that. Images should be resized to the dimensions they’re actually displayed at, compressed, and saved in a modern format like WebP or AVIF instead of PNG or JPEG where possible.<\/p>\n
Fix:<\/strong> run images through a compression tool before uploading, and set your CMS or build process to resize automatically.<\/p>\n2. CSS and JavaScript that block the page from rendering<\/h2>\n
When a browser hits a <script><\/code> or <link><\/code> tag in the <head><\/code> of a page, it often stops and waits for that file to load before showing anything. If you have several of these stacked up, the visitor stares at a blank screen while the browser works through the list.<\/p>\nFix:<\/strong> load non-critical scripts with defer<\/code> or async<\/code>, and only load what’s needed for the first thing the visitor sees.<\/p>\n3. No browser caching set up<\/h2>\n
Without caching rules, a visitor’s browser re-downloads your logo, fonts, and stylesheets every single time they load a page on your site, even if nothing changed. This is easy to miss because it doesn’t affect the first visit, only every visit after that.<\/p>\n
Fix:<\/strong> set cache-control headers on static files (images, CSS, JS, fonts) so browsers store them locally.<\/p>\n4. No content delivery network (CDN)<\/h2>\n
If your server is in one location and a visitor is on the other side of the world, every file has to travel that whole distance. A CDN stores copies of your site’s files in multiple locations, so visitors load from the server closest to them.<\/p>\n
Fix:<\/strong> most CDNs (Cloudflare being a common one) are free or low-cost to set up and don’t require touching your site’s code.<\/p>\n5. A bloated theme or too many plugins<\/h2>\n
This mostly applies to WordPress and similar platforms. Every plugin adds its own CSS, JavaScript, and sometimes database queries, whether you’re using its features on a given page or not. A theme built with dozens of unused features does the same thing.<\/p>\n
Fix:<\/strong> audit plugins regularly and remove ones that aren’t actively used. A lean, purpose-built theme almost always outperforms a heavy, do-everything one.<\/p>\n6. Third-party scripts nobody’s checked in a while<\/h2>\n
Live chat widgets, ad pixels, social media embeds, and analytics tools all add their own network requests. Each one is a small delay on its own, but they add up fast, and it’s common for a site to be running scripts from a tool nobody uses anymore.<\/p>\n
Fix:<\/strong> review every third-party script on the site every few months and remove anything not delivering clear value.<\/p>\n7. Images and videos that load before they’re needed<\/h2>\n
By default, browsers load every image on a page immediately, even ones far below what the visitor can see without scrolling. On a long page, that means loading content the visitor may never scroll down to see.<\/p>\n
Fix:<\/strong> use lazy loading (loading=\"lazy\"<\/code> on images is built into modern browsers) so offscreen content loads only when the visitor scrolls near it.<\/p>\n8. Too many web fonts, or fonts loaded the wrong way<\/h2>\n
Custom fonts look good, but each font weight and style is a separate file to download. A page using six weights of one font, plus a second font for headings, can be downloading more font data than actual content.<\/p>\n
Fix:<\/strong> limit yourself to two or three font weights, and use font-display: swap<\/code> so text shows in a fallback font while the custom one loads, instead of staying invisible.<\/p>\n9. Slow server response time<\/h2>\n
This one isn’t in the code at all. If your hosting is slow, cheap, or overloaded with other sites sharing the same resources, no amount of front-end optimization will fully fix it. This shows up as “Time to First Byte” (TTFB) in speed testing tools.<\/p>\n
Fix:<\/strong> test your TTFB with a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights. If it’s consistently slow, the fix is better hosting, not more code changes.<\/p>\n10. Code that was never cleaned up for production<\/h2>\n
Unminified CSS and JavaScript, old code left in from a previous version of the site, or unused CSS rules from a theme that’s been redesigned twice \u2014 all of this still gets sent to every visitor’s browser, even though none of it does anything.<\/p>\n
Fix:<\/strong> minify CSS and JS before publishing, and periodically remove code that isn’t being used anymore.<\/p>\nThe pattern behind all ten<\/h2>\n
None of these problems are exotic. They’re mistakes of neglect more than mistakes of skill \u2014 things that get added during development and never get removed, or settings that get skipped because a deadline was tight. A site that’s fast on launch day can quietly slow down over a year as more images, plugins, and scripts get added without anything being taken away.<\/p>\n
If your site has been live for a while and hasn’t had a speed check recently, that’s usually where to start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A slow website costs you visitors before they even see what you offer. Google’s own research on mobile page speed found that the chance of someone leaving your page jumps by 32% as load time goes from one second to three seconds. (https:\/\/www.thinkwithgoogle.com\/data\/page-load-time-statistics\/)If your site feels sluggish, it’s usually not one big problem. It’s a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-web-development","category-uncategorized","category-web-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136,"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/136"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avishkarstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}