Slow to start loading

How to see it yourself, in a minute

1. Open pagespeed.web.dev and put your address in.
2. A performance score under 50 on mobile, or a Time to First Byte over a second, is this fault.
3. Compare it with the same test run on ukcarimports.ie, which serves 130,000 pages and scores 100.

Or paste your address into the free audit, which checks this and seventeen other faults in ten seconds.

Why it matters

Half of mobile visitors give up if a page takes more than three seconds. Google also uses speed as a ranking signal, so a slow site loses twice: fewer visitors arrive, and fewer of those stay.

Half of mobile visitors give up if a page takes more than three seconds. Google uses speed as a ranking signal, so a slow site loses twice: fewer visitors arrive, and fewer of those stay. Slow sites are almost always slow for a reason that costs nothing to fix: cheap shared hosting, an overloaded theme, or four-megabyte photos.

How we fix it

We find where the time goes (usually the hosting, an overloaded theme, or unoptimised images), fix it, and prove it with Google's own test before and after.

1. Measure where the time goes: server, page weight, scripts, images.
2. Fix the biggest cause first; on most small business sites that is images that were never resized, then the hosting.
3. Add caching and a CDN so the page is served from near the visitor.
4. Prove it with the same public test before and after.

How long: A half day to a day.

Questions people ask about this

Our hosting costs €5 a month. Is that the problem?

Often, yes, and moving costs less than you think. But the images and the theme are usually a bigger cause, so we measure before we blame the hosting.

Will a faster site rank higher?

It removes a penalty and improves everything visitors do on the page. It is not magic by itself; it is the floor everything else stands on.

People usually find this page by searching

• “why is my website so slow”
• “speed up website”
• “improve page speed score”