A slow website frustrates visitors and can hurt your search engine rankings. Common causes include:
- Large, unoptimised images - a single photo straight off a modern phone camera can be many megabytes. Compressing images before uploading them often gives the single biggest speed improvement.
- Too many plugins or scripts, especially on WordPress sites - each one adds extra loading time.
- An outgrown hosting plan - if your traffic or website size has grown a lot since you signed up, it may be time to upgrade.
- Server location - a server far from your visitors (e.g. hosted overseas for a mostly South African audience) adds delay. Hosting locally, close to your customers, usually helps.
If you're not sure where the slowdown is coming from, your hosting provider can usually help you check server-side factors, while your web developer can look at front-end issues like image sizes and scripts.