Slow Website? Improve Your Loading Time – Step by Step

Nobody likes to wait. When a website stays blank on a mobile phone for too long, visitors leave – and head to the competition instead. Google also evaluates user experience, which includes loading time. The good news: many bottlenecks can be fixed with reasonable effort.

Measure loading time correctly

Don't just test on your fast office computer. What matters is how the page loads on an average mobile phone over a mobile network. These tools help:

• Google PageSpeed Insights – measures your page and shows specific improvement suggestions
• Search Console – shows you how real visitors experience your page
• Website check from Klaic Media – our free check examines loading time, page size and more in seconds

The three most important metrics

Google summarises user experience in what are called Core Web Vitals:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): When is the largest visible content loaded? A value up to 2.5 seconds is good.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): How quickly does the page respond to clicks and input? Up to 200 milliseconds is good.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Does content jump around while loading? A value up to 0.1 is good.

The most common bottlenecks – and what helps

Images that are too large

A photo straight from your camera can be several megabytes in size. Images should be delivered in the right size and in modern formats like WebP or AVIF – and only loaded when they scroll into view.

Too many plugins and scripts

Every plugin, every tracking tool and every chat widget loads additional code. Check critically what you really need. Often several tools can be replaced by one.

Slow hosting

If the server's initial response is slow, no on-page optimisation will help. Cheap hosting packages with many customers on one server are often the culprit.

Missing caching

With caching, returning visitors don't have to reload everything, and the server doesn't have to recalculate pages with every visit.

Fonts and website builder bloat

Many font weights and bloated code from website builders make pages heavy. Less is more here.

When a redesign makes sense

Sometimes the basic structure is so heavy that optimisations only bring marginal improvements. In that case, a lean new website might be cheaper than endless patching. Modern technology like our web development often loads in fractions of a second without any extra effort.

Conclusion

Measure first, then optimise strategically: images, scripts and hosting usually bring the biggest impact. If you want to know where your website stands, start our website check – you can request the result as a detailed PDF report.