Your Website Is Slow. Your Customers Notice. Let’s Fix That.

Half your website visitors will ditch you if you make them wait 3 seconds. Google did the research and discovered that 53% of mobile traffic will abandon the visit if your webpage takes longer than 3 seconds to load. A slow site sends prospective customers packing before they ever get to see how great you actually are.

Even if they stick around, you’re still in trouble. Because they start to get frustrated with your website. As curiosity carries them from page to page, each click brings a spark of anticipation. They lean in… then nothing happens. Ugh, c’mon. Load already.

They sigh. They wait. Eventually they give up. 

It’s a bad experience while they browse, and a bad memory after they leave.

If the “Contact Us” link in your site’s navigation bar directed visitors to a 404 Error page, wouldn’t you fix it right away? But that broken link would only affect a subset of your traffic. A slow site hinders every visitor every time.

Think about your own buying patterns: When you’re seriously interested in a product or service, don’t you repeatedly return to the site over several days? Your hot prospects do too. And they keep hitting the same sluggish site, cooling down while they’re forced to wait.

Visitors Hate to Wait

Waiting is painful. The other day, I was standing in line at my local coffee shop. After the guy in front of me placed his order, he didn’t realize I was waiting behind him. He made small talk with the barista for… well, it was probably only three minutes, but it felt like forever as I stood there in my uncaffeinated state. The same is true for your web visitors: any wait feels long, longer than it should be.

Offline, Amazon has trained your customers to rely on two-day delivery, then one-day delivery, then three-hour delivery. Online, even people who are old enough to remember waiting minutes for dial-up internet will now rage-quit the tab if a spinning wheel appears. Facebook loads near-instantly; so do YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, all the sites your prospects visit daily. They expect the same immediacy when they click on your website. Yes, it’s unrealistic. As a small business owner, you don’t have the resources of giant companies like Apple and Netflix—but your visitors still hold you to the same site-speed standard. It’s a high bar.

A Slow Site Hurts Your Bottom Line

Falling short of that high bar costs you. You paid for this traffic. Maybe directly with Google pay-per-click ads or SEO-optimized content, maybe indirectly with your brand equity and word-of-mouth referrals. Either way, a slow website is a massive damper on how much bang you get for your marketing buck.

Small business owners know their site’s load time is hurting their lead generation (and their revenue). I hear it constantly: “Our website is so slow.” It’s a common complaint because most websites are not optimized for speed—and speed doesn’t happen by chance. It must be deliberately built in. 

Tell a furniture maker “I need a chair” and you might get 2x4s nailed together—technically a chair, but not what you wanted. Specify “comfortable and elegant” and you get a Herman Miller lounge chair. Web design works the same way: If you don't build for fast, you won’t get fast.

How Fast Is Your Site Really? Do a Tool Check and a Gut Check

How do you figure out how fast your website actually is, especially if you’re not an uber-techy person?

Thankfully there are a couple simple diagnostics you can use. I recommend you do both a “tool check” and a “gut check.”

For the tool check, visit Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. (I use it every day, for my own website and for clients’ websites.) Paste your homepage’s URL in the box and click “Analyze.” Within 60 seconds it’ll spit out a report showing your homepage’s overall Performance Score (between 1 and 100), plus a long list of issues that are dragging the score down.

Note that PageSpeed Insights reviews a single webpage, not your entire site at once. So after you check your homepage, analyze other high-value pages: About, Contact Us, Pricing. That’s the full picture of what an exploring visitor encounters.

After the tool check, do a gut check. Pull up your website on your phone. How long does it take? How long does it feel?

Now, if you visit your own website often, your phone has already stored cookies and image caches. So the load speed will be faster for you than it actually is for a brand-new visitor. To avoid this deceptive result, clear your phone’s cache and cookies, then try again. Or just borrow your friend’s phone. If that takes longer, it’s not the device—your site’s real speed has been revealed.

The 3 Most Likely Reasons Your Website Is Slow

At this point, you probably feel a bit embarrassed that your site is so slow. Maybe a bit ashamed that you haven’t fixed this problem already. And probably quite mad at how many leads & clients it’s costing you.

So what’s actually causing it?

Unfortunately, saying “I want my site to be faster” is a bit like saying “I want my home to be well-insulated.” A house only maintains its temperature despite the weather if the builder did a dozen different things right, from installing dual-pane windows to putting weatherstripping around the doors. Similarly, a speedy website is the result of checking off dozens of factors—and that’s a list of chores you don’t want to assign to yourself.

That said, there are a few common culprits that you can check on your own. 

Culprit #1. Unoptimized Images

First, unoptimized images. Ninety percent of websites I review contain oversized images, and giant images take forever to load. A web browser can pull up 10,000 words of content in the same time it takes it to display a single low-quality 20KB image. What you want to do is to optimize the size of your images. Here’s how:

#1. Set the maximum image dimensions. A high-quality photo might be 5,000 pixels per side. For desktop, I decrease the max display width to 2560 pixels. (Some designers do 1920 pixels, but I prefer 2560 for better image clarity.)

#2. Compress the image. This shrinks its file size without losing quality. I like to use a free tool called TinyPNG or TinyJPG (same tool at two different websites). The free version is really robust, so you shouldn’t have to pay anything.

#3. Convert the image from a standard format (like PNG or JPEG) to a web-optimized format like WebP or AVIF. You can do this at file-conversion sites like CloudConvert and Cloudinary.

Culprit #2. Clunky Plugins

After images, the second most common site-speed culprit is clunky plugins (or more generally, any custom code written in JavaScript).

A plugin is a convenient website add-on. Someone else built it, and you can add it to your site with just a few clicks. Want a live chat widget? A popup? A cookie-consent banner? There’s a plugin for that.

The danger is that plugins (and other custom code) can be bloated with extra instructions. A clumsily-written plugin could decelerate your speedy site to a crawl. Multiple plugins compound the problem; they can even issue contradictory instructions, forcing the browser to resolve the tension before it displays anything to your impatient visitor.

PageSpeed Insights gets very detailed on what resources are causing slow load speeds. If a plugin is to blame, you’ll know it. The easiest way to fix a slow plugin is to delete it and find a better one, or to write clean custom code instead. The second-easiest way is to add an “async” tag that tells the browser, “Load this plugin’s functionality later, after you display the page.” (If this seems intimidating, any competent web developer can handle it for you.)

Culprit #3. Subpar Hosting

The third most common site-speed culprit is subpar hosting.

To deliver a letter to a friend who lives across the country, you can hand it to the USPS mailman with a 78¢ stamp, and it’ll arrive in 2–5 days. Or you can pay $47 for FedEx Priority Overnight and it’ll arrive by 10:30am the next morning. Same result—very different speed.

Delivering your website from where it lives to a visitor’s computer is similar. See, your website doesn’t merely exist out there on the internet. It actually lives on a physical server in a data center somewhere—that’s called “hosting.” 

The shared hosting that most websites use is super cheap, like $5–$10/month. It’s inexpensive because the hosting company rents the same physical server to hundreds of different websites. And just like living in an apartment building, you don’t get to pick your neighbors. Anytime the other sites on the server gobble up more bandwidth, less is left over for you. In a real sense it’s not your site’s fault that it’s slow; it’s being dragged down by the company it keeps.

To avoid this you can either pay for exclusive rights to a slice of the server, or purchase managed hosting where the hosting company commits to monitor your site so it gets the resources it needs. You’ll pay $15–$20 a month, which for most business owners is a very reasonable cost to keep from driving customers away.

Resist the Urge to Hack and Slash

When you look at that PageSpeed Insights report, it’s easy to become obsessed with getting a perfect-100 Performance Score. But that may actually be more detrimental to your visitors than a marginally slower site. For instance, your site will undoubtedly load faster if it’s a wall of text with no images or design elements. But it’ll also look unfriendly, which is no way to greet your prospective customers.

This is where you may want to consult with someone who does this for a living. You don’t want to find yourself staring at the PageSpeed Insights report, wondering, “Is jquery.min.js a bloated plugin that I should delete? Or will touching it break my site?” A competent, trustworthy web developer can walk you through the pros and cons of stripping things out of your website—and he can tell you what deserves to stay, even if you sacrifice a few milliseconds of load time to keep it. 

How to Find Some Help (That’s Actually Helpful)

At some point, trying to fix site speed yourself stops being worth it. If you’re a gung-ho DIY sort, then sure, do the image optimization yourself. That’s a great place to start. But when you get into the fiddly optimizations, you probably want to hire someone who just knows how to do it.

Your web designer doesn’t have to be the world’s top optimization expert, but they should at least have their head on their shoulders when talking about it. You should expect to hear a clear listing of the primary factors that affect site speed, plus a discussion of the tradeoffs involved (like, “This cool animation on your homepage adds personality, but it also adds a tenth of a second to the load time.”) 

Should You Improve or Rebuild?

Do you really need a brand-new website? Or can you keep slogging along with what you have?

My honest counsel is: It depends. Is your website absolutely slow and clunky? Does it take forever to load? If it’s that bad then you should probably start fresh. But if you’d describe your website as “good but not great,” then keeping it and trying to speed it up is a reasonable decision for many business owners. You’ll need to invest some energy and dollars into the optimization, but you don’t have to burn your site to the ground.

On the other hand, you could just start fresh with a new website. It’s not that hard. Thanks to modern platforms, a website rebuild isn’t as complicated as it used to be. Starting fresh gives you the best shot at a website that looks good and loads fast, a website you’re proud to share.

Don’t Forget the Humans

After so much about reports and optimization, I want to bring it back to the human factor. Real people are visiting your website, evaluating you, pondering whether to contact you. Consider them. Elsewhere in your business, you work hard to serve your customers. A clean, fast website serves them too. They may never thank you. But they won’t curse your name as they stare at a loading screen.