Why your site feels slow (and it is probably not your host)
Speed problems are usually shipped, not hosted. A short tour of the four things we remove first.
When a site feels sluggish, the first instinct is to blame the hosting. Occasionally that is right. Usually the weight came with the build.
Four things account for most of it. Uncompressed images that are three times larger than the space they occupy. Three or four web fonts where one family would do. Analytics, chat widgets, and pixels that each load their own small library. And animation libraries pulled in to fade one heading.
We measure on a mid-range phone over a throttled connection, because that is closer to how people actually visit. A page that loads instantly on a desktop with fibre can take eight seconds in a car park.
Removing weight is unglamorous work with an obvious payoff: pages that appear immediately, and visitors who stay long enough to read them.
Jonas Reid
Developer
Builds the sites and keeps them fast on slow phones.
