Why your website feels slow, and the five fixes that usually solve it

When a client tells us their site feels slow, the cause is almost always one of five things, and usually the first two.

Images: uncompressed, oversized, and not lazy-loaded. Converting to WebP and serving the right size is the single biggest win on most sites.

Fonts: too many weights, loaded from too many places, blocking the first paint. Two weights, one host, font-display swap.

Caching: no page cache, no browser cache headers, no CDN. Cloudflare in front of the site fixes most of this for free.

Third-party scripts: chat widgets, pixels and analytics, each adding hundreds of milliseconds. Load them after the page, or ask whether you need them at all.

The server: shared hosting with PHP 7 and no OPcache. See our post on hosting.

Do those five in that order and Core Web Vitals usually go green without touching the design.