Why is your site slow? Five places to look

When a corporate site loads slowly, the first thing people blame is usually the images. But in our experience, slowness tends to come from elsewhere: hosting, font loading, third-party code and caching settings. Finding the culprit by measuring rather than guessing is, on most sites, the single thing that makes the biggest difference. Below we go through these five points in the order you should check them.

Start with the server and the fonts

Cheap shared hosting can cost you seconds before the page's first byte even arrives. Measuring your server's response time is a few minutes' work, and it often surfaces the real bottleneck on its own. The second suspect is fonts.

Font setups that load every weight as a separate file and hide text while the page opens are a common cause of slowdown. Dropping the weights you don't use and loading the font with the right strategy makes a noticeable difference — with no compromise on the design.

Before the images: the first four stops

• Server response time — start by measuring the time to first byte.
• Font loading — strip out unused weights and files.
• Third-party code — prune your inventory of analytics and plugins.
• Caching — don't make repeat visits as expensive as the first one.

The fifth stop: the images

Images come last on the list, because when they're served at the right size and in a modern format they're rarely the sole culprit. Measure first, then fix — that way the effort isn't wasted.

The reason speed tends to slip back over time after launch is usually neglect: a plugin that got added, an image that wasn't optimized, an infrastructure that never gets updated. That's why it's better to treat speed not as a one-off task but as part of ongoing maintenance and support.