Why your website is slow, in order of likelihood
Before you buy a bigger server, check these. In our experience the cause is almost never the hardware.
When a site is slow the first instinct is to blame the hosting. Sometimes it is. Far more often it is one of these, in roughly this order.
1. Images nobody optimised
A photo straight from a phone is four megabytes. Twenty of them on a page is eighty megabytes for something that should weigh under two. This single issue accounts for more slow sites than everything else combined.
2. No caching
Without caching, every visitor makes the server rebuild the same page from scratch. With it, the server hands over a file it prepared earlier. On WordPress the difference is routinely ten times faster.
3. Too many plugins doing the same thing
Three SEO plugins, two caching plugins that fight each other, a slider library loaded on every page for one slider on the homepage. Each adds queries and scripts to every single request.
4. A database nobody has cleaned
Years of post revisions, expired transients and orphaned metadata. We routinely find databases where 70% of the rows serve no purpose.
5. The server, finally
Sometimes it genuinely is undersized. But moving a badly built site to a bigger server just makes it slow more expensively.
We have taken sites from eight seconds to under two without changing the hosting once. The bottleneck is almost always something you can fix for free.
Dealing with this yourself?
We manage infrastructure, automation and AI for companies that would rather focus on their business. Tell us what is breaking.
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