Why is my website slow? Common causes and quick fixes
By Nick Crookston, Axeldyne · Updated November 4, 2026
Most customers find you on a phone, often on a mobile connection. If your page takes several seconds to show anything, some of them give up before they see your phone number.
Measure first
Run your home page through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile results. It lists the biggest problems in order. Test a few times; results vary between runs.
The usual causes
- Huge images. A photo straight from a phone or camera can be several megabytes. This is the most common cause on small-business sites.
- Too many plugins, widgets or tracking scripts, each adding more to download.
- Auto-playing video or large sliders at the top of the page.
- Slow or overloaded hosting, especially the cheapest shared plans.
- No caching, so the server rebuilds every page for every visitor.
Quick fixes
- Resize images to the size they’re actually shown (rarely wider than about 2000 pixels) and compress them, or convert to WebP. On WordPress an image-optimization plugin can do this automatically.
- Remove plugins and widgets you don’t use.
- Replace an auto-playing hero video with a still image.
- Turn on caching (your host or a caching plugin), and a CDN if your host offers one free.
- If it’s still slow after all that, ask your host about a better plan or move.
Our free checker reports how long your home page took to respond from our server, which is a quick first signal. For detailed mobile performance, use PageSpeed Insights.
Check your site in 10 seconds
Our free checker tests HTTPS, load speed, tap-to-call, contact options and leftover template text. Found something? The Axeldyne team can fix it from $99, with a written quote before any work starts and every fix reviewed by Nick Crookston before it goes live.