Why is my website slow?

What to do about it

1. Measure before you change anything. Run your URL through the free WebVitalist scan and Google PageSpeed Insights so you know whether the server, images, or scripts are the bottleneck.
2. Check the server response time. The free WebVitalist scan warns when the HTML takes longer than 1,500 ms to arrive, and the full audit uses under 800 ms as its lab target. If your server is slower than that, fix caching or hosting before touching images.
3. Resize and compress images to the size they actually display at. The largest image is usually the hero; a photo straight from a phone camera is almost always far bigger than it needs to be.
4. Audit third-party scripts: chat widgets, analytics, ad pixels, A/B testing tools, embeds. Remove the ones you do not use, and ask your developer to load the rest after the page is interactive.
5. Re-measure after each change. Changing five things at once means you never learn which one helped.

What WebVitalist checks

The free scan runs 19 technical checks on one public URL. These are the ones that matter for this question:

• Server response time (ttfb): The free scan records how long the server took to deliver the HTML and warns when that took longer than 1,500 ms.
• HTML size (html-size): The free scan warns when the HTML document is larger than 400 kB, which the browser must download and parse before it can paint anything.

A paid audit ($9 and up) also runs a real mobile Lighthouse test through Google PageSpeed Insights and reads field data for LCP, INP and CLS, where Google has it.