Slow website? Here's how to run a speed check yourself in half an hour

A slow website costs you customers and search rankings — but you don't need to be a developer to make the biggest gains. A practical check in half an hour, no jargon required.

Your website is slow. Not "broken" — just… sluggish. The homepage flickers, images load in chunks, and on mobile it can take six seconds before anything happens. You know it, your customers feel it, and Google factors it into your search rankings. But where do you start when you don't have an IT person in-house?

Good news: you don't need to be a developer to make the biggest gains. In this post we walk through the same check we run on SMB websites ourselves — in half an hour, without rebuilding anything.

Why speed (still) matters

A slow site costs you customers in three ways:

• Visitors bounce. After three seconds of loading, roughly a third of your mobile visitors are gone. They don't click "wait a moment" — they click "back".
• Google ranks you lower. Core Web Vitals have been a ranking signal for years. Not decisive on its own, but measurable.
• Conversions drop. People won't fill in a quote form on a site that keeps stuttering.

And yes: this applies to B2B too. "Our clients are always at the office on fibre" — sure, but they also open your site on the train, at a petrol station, or via a 4G hotspot.

Step 1: measure first, don't guess

Before you change anything: measure how slow your site actually is. Not on your own laptop with your own Wi-Fi (you've already got the site in your cache), but through a neutral measurement.

Two tools you can use today:

• PageSpeed Insights from Google. Gives you a score for mobile and desktop, plus concrete suggestions for improvement.
• Our own speed test if you want to know how fast your own connection is — useful for ruling out that the problem is on your end before you call your web developer.

Write down the results. Mobile score below 50? There's a lot to gain. Above 80? Great — then you're looking at fine-tuning.

Step 2: the three usual suspects

In 9 out of 10 slow SMB websites, the delay comes from the same three sources.

1. Oversized images

The classic. Someone uploads a 4,500 × 3,000 pixel, 6 MB photo, even though it appears as an 800-pixel-wide thumbnail on your site. The visitor still has to download the entire file.

What you can do today:

• Open your media library (in WordPress: Media → Library) and sort by file size. Anything over 500 KB is suspicious.
• Resize the originals before re-uploading them. Tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh do this for free.
• If you're using WordPress, enable a plugin that automatically compresses new uploads and serves them in WebP format.

2. Too many scripts and plugins

Every additional script — chat widget, cookie banner, analytics, social feeds, A/B testing tool, that one form plugin — adds to your load time. On many sites we see, 30 to 50% of the load time is taken up by things the owner barely uses.

Do an honest audit:

• Which plugins are you actually using? When did you last look at the stats from your chat widget?
• Do you have three different analytics packages running because nobody switched the old ones off?
• Is there still a Facebook pixel you haven't used in years?

Turning things off is free and delivers immediate results. If in doubt: disable it, wait a week, see if anyone notices.

3. Slow hosting

Cheap shared hosting at €3 a month often means your site is sharing a server with hundreds of other sites. When a neighbour spikes, your site crawls.

Signs that hosting is the culprit:

• The "server response time" in PageSpeed Insights is higher than 600 ms.
• Your site is noticeably slower in the evenings than during the day.
• You occasionally see a 502 or 504 error.

Upgrading to decent managed hosting typically costs €15 to €40 per month. For a business website, that's negligible.

Step 3: enable caching (and configure it properly)

Caching means your site stores a ready-made version of each page, so it doesn't have to rebuild everything from scratch for every visitor. This typically cuts load time by a factor of two to five.

Most WordPress sites already have a plugin for this (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache). Check that it's actually switched on and properly configured. We regularly see sites where the caching plugin is installed but still running on default settings — which barely helps at all.

Step 4: measure again

It sounds obvious, but this is where a lot of people drop the ball. After each change, run a new measurement. That way you know what works and what doesn't, and you build up a picture of what delivers the most value for your specific site.

When it's time to call in help

Some things can't be fixed with plugins. An outdated theme loading 200 KB of CSS just for the fonts, a database bloated with overhead, or hosting that's structurally below par — those call for a proper clean-up.

If you suspect your site needs more maintenance than half an hour today can handle, take a look at our website speed optimisation or WordPress clean-up services. We always start with a measurement, so you know upfront what to expect. And if you'd rather test things yourself first? Run our speed test and see how far you get.