Your website is slow.

The short answer

Almost everyone looking for a business does it on their phone, often over 4G rather than the office Wi-Fi. If your website is slow to show anything, they go to the next result before they see your phone number. The causes are few and they keep coming up: huge images, plugins and builders that load too much code, hosting that is slow to respond and no caching. All of them can be measured and all of them can be fixed.

Why it's slow

• Huge images. Photos several megabytes in size, straight off the phone or the camera, shown in a small space. It's the most common cause and the one that weighs the most.
• Heavy plugins and builders. Each WordPress plugin can load its code on every page, even where it isn't used. Visual page builders and platforms such as Wix add a lot of code of their own.
• Third-party extras. The chat widget, the embedded map, videos, ad pixels and web fonts. Each one is another download, and some block the page until they arrive.
• Cheap hosting. A shared server with hundreds of websites takes a while to respond before it sends anything. If the server is far from your customers, it takes longer still.
• No caching. The website rebuilds every page from scratch on every visit, instead of keeping a ready-made copy and serving it instantly.

What you can check yourself

• Audit your website in 20 seconds on the home page. It gives you Google's score on a phone over 4G plus eighteen more checks. It's the first step to knowing whether the problem is speed or something else.
• Open your website on your phone using mobile data, not Wi-Fi, in a private window. That way you see it as a new customer does, not with whatever your phone had already stored.
• Run the page that gets the most visits through PageSpeed Insights, Google's tool. Further down it shows which images and scripts weigh the most.
• If it's a WordPress site, count the active plugins and ask yourself which ones you really use.

What Google measures

Google explains in Web Vitals the three measures it calls Core Web Vitals: how long the main content of the page takes to appear, how long the page takes to respond when you tap something and how much the content shifts while it loads. In its Search documentation it says that good Core Web Vitals align with what its ranking systems seek to reward. It isn't the only thing that counts. Its guide to getting the main content to load sooner points to the same things you see in practice: server response time, images that are too large and scripts that block the page.

What not to do

• Don't install another "optimisation" plugin on top of the ones you have. Sometimes it helps, but often it adds more code and clashes with the others.
• Don't move hosting without measuring first. If images are what weighs it down, the website will be just as slow on the new server. And if you do end up moving, see how to change hosting without losing your website or email.
• Don't chase the score at any cost. Removing things blindly to gain a few points can break the form or the shop. The score is a means, not the end.
• Don't pay anyone who guarantees you a score or a position. The score changes from one test to the next, and your position on Google doesn't depend on speed alone.

When to call someone in

If your website is still slow after you've compressed the images, if you don't know which plugins can go without breaking anything or if it's built with a builder that won't let you touch the code, the problem goes deeper. That's when it pays to have it measured by someone who knows what weighs it down and why.

How Vaseia fixes it

• I measure first, on mobile and over 4G, to find what weighs the most.
• I resize images to the size they're shown at and convert them to modern formats. The ones you don't see when the page opens load later.
• I remove what isn't needed: unused plugins, third-party scripts that add nothing and extra fonts.
• I set up caching and a content delivery network so the page is served close to whoever requests it.
• Sometimes what pays is rebuilding it as a static website, with no database or page builder and every old address redirected to the new one. I look at each case and tell you before I start.
• I measure again after every change, and speed goes into your dashboard every month.

A fast website is half the job. The other half is getting found: see why a website gets no traffic. And if it simply won't load or shows an error, see what to do if your website won't load.

If you'd rather not wrestle with this

Tell me your website address and what it's built with. I'll measure it and tell you what's slowing it down and what it would take, with a fixed price before I start. What I won't promise is a specific score or a position on Google. What I will do is measure it before and after. I work remotely, in English, with businesses outside Spain. I don't compete on price. I compete on quality and speed.

Questions