Why is my website slow, and what can be done?

A slow site loses visitors before they read a word, and search engines notice how a page feels to real users. Speed is one of the few parts of a website that you can measure exactly, which also makes it one of the easiest to discuss badly. This guide explains what the speed measures mean, what usually makes a business site slow, and what to ask a developer who says the site is fast.

What Core Web Vitals measure

Google groups the experience of a page into three measures, called Core Web Vitals. Each one describes something a visitor feels:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). How long the main content takes to appear. Google's guidance calls 2.5 seconds or less good.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP). How quickly the page reacts when a visitor taps, clicks or types. Google's guidance calls 200 milliseconds or less good.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). How much the page jumps while it loads, for example when an image appears and pushes the text down. Google's guidance calls 0.1 or less good.

These thresholds come from Google's own documentation, which can change. Check the current figures on web.dev. Google assesses each measure at the 75th percentile of real page visits, so a page is judged on what most visitors see, not on its best load. A fast result on your own laptop and fibre line says little. What counts is how the page behaves on an ordinary phone on a mobile network.

Lab data and field data

Two kinds of measurement exist, and they answer different questions.

• Lab data. A tool such as Lighthouse loads the page in a controlled setup and reports a score. It is repeatable, so it is good for finding and fixing problems. It is a simulation.
• Field data. Real visitors' browsers report how pages actually performed. Google collects this in the Chrome User Experience Report and shows it in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, when a site has enough visits. It is the closer picture of what people feel.

A site with a perfect lab score can still have poor field results, and a small site can have no field data at all. Use the lab tool to fix and the field data to confirm.

What usually makes a business site slow

• Heavy images. Photos uploaded at full camera size, in an old format, with no sizes for small screens. This is a common cause of a slow first view.
• Too much script. Chat widgets, tracking tags, sliders, animation libraries and plugins each add code the phone must download and run. Every one has a cost, and many sites carry tools nobody uses.
• Fonts that block the text. Several font files, loaded late, can hide the text or make it jump when the font arrives.
• A slow server or distant hosting. A page that waits a long time for the first byte starts late whatever else you do.
• A page builder or theme built for every case. A general tool ships code for features your page does not use.
• Content that moves. Banners, cookie notices, ads and images without a set size push the page around as they load.
• No caching. The same files are downloaded again and again instead of being kept by the browser or served from a nearby network.

Our guides to WordPress or custom code and to website hosting explain how those two choices affect the list above.

Speed and search

Google says that Core Web Vitals are part of how it assesses page experience, and that great page experience does not replace relevant content. A fast page with little to say will not rank above a useful one. Treat speed as a base that stops you losing visitors, not as a shortcut to the top of the results. See Google's own page on Core Web Vitals and Search.

Questions to ask a developer

• How do you measure speed, and on what device and network?
• Do you look at field data, or only at a lab score?
• How do you size and compress images, and which formats do you use?
• What third-party scripts will the site load, and who decides to add more later?
• How do you stop the layout from jumping while the page loads?
• Who checks speed after launch, when new content and plugins arrive? A site that is fast on launch day can slow down over the following months. See website maintenance.

Sources and further reading

• web.dev: Web Vitals
• Google Search Central: Core Web Vitals and Google Search

Speed is one item of a wider technical SEO checklist.

Tools that set cookies also add weight: see website cookies.

How DMC Kreatif handles it

We build pages to load their main content quickly on a phone, with images sized for the screen, fonts loaded without hiding the text and a layout that does not jump. We test on phone widths before a project is handed over. We do not promise a score or a ranking, because the result depends on your content, your tools and your hosting.

If speed matters for your project, say so in the brief and tell us which tools you need to keep, such as a booking widget or analytics. Then ask for a quote. Within 48 h you get a concrete approach, a realistic timeline and a clear quote. Our website service page shows how a project runs.