A slow website loses visitors and rankings in Google, which includes Core Web Vitals in its assessment of page experience. Before installing yet another “optimisation” plugin, you need to measure. Here are the causes we come across most often in our audits.
Server response time that is too high
If the server takes more than half a second to respond, no front-end optimisation will make up for it. The usual culprits: overloaded shared hosting, an old PHP version, no object cache (Redis) or page cache.
Plugins that do too much
Every plugin can add scripts to every page, queries on every load and scheduled tasks. Query Monitor lets you pinpoint exactly which ones are expensive. Often, a few lines of custom code are a better replacement for an entire plugin.
A cluttered database
Oversized autoloaded options, accumulated revisions, orphaned tables left behind by old plugins: a targeted clean-up and the addition of indexes significantly reduce page generation time.
Poorly served images and fonts
Images that are not resized, no modern formats (WebP, AVIF), fonts loaded from a third-party service without preloading: these issues directly degrade LCP and CLS.
A page builder that is too heavy
Visual page builders often generate a lot of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. A custom theme based on the native block editor is generally much lighter, while remaining easy to edit.
Want to know exactly what is slowing down your website? Our performance and security audit gives you a costed action plan in 5 days.