--- title: "Website speed: why your site is slow, and how to measure it yourself before paying anyone" description: "Heavy images, fonts, tracking scripts and crowded hosting. The most common causes of slow websites we fix, how to find yours with a free tool in minutes, and what is worth fixing first." lang: en canonical: https://www.kerneltics.com/en/blog/website-speed-why-slow source: https://www.kerneltics.com/en/blog/website-speed-why-slow alternate_ar: https://www.kerneltics.com/blog/website-speed-why-slow type: article published: 2026-09-22T00:20:42.958Z updated: 2026-09-22T00:20:42.961Z author: "kerneltics" tags: ["سرعة الموقع", "SEO", "مواقع", "أداء"] --- # Website speed: why your site is slow, and how to measure it yourself before paying anyone > Heavy images, fonts, tracking scripts and crowded hosting. The most common causes of slow websites we fix, how to find yours with a free tool in minutes, and what is worth fixing first. "Our website is slow" is something we hear a lot, and usually the person saying it does not know exactly where it is slow: the home page? On mobile? The first load, or every load? Without that, the fix becomes a guess, and most guesses cost money and change nothing. We have fixed slow sites on WordPress and on custom systems, and almost every time the cause is one of five. This post teaches you to measure it yourself, find the cause, and know what is worth fixing first. ## Why speed matters in the first place - **Visitors leave.** On mobile, every extra second loses a share of visitors before they see anything. If they came from an ad, you paid for them. - **Google measures it.** Core Web Vitals are part of search ranking, and you see them in Search Console. - **Conversion drops.** A page that lags loses bookings and orders, even when the visitor waits. ## How to measure it yourself (free, in five minutes) Open [PageSpeed Insights](https://pagespeed.web.dev) and paste your page's URL. You will see two sections: **1. Real user data** (if your site has enough traffic): this is the one that matters, because it comes from real visitors on their devices and networks. The three metrics: LCP (when the largest element appears), INP (how much interaction lags), CLS (how much elements shift while loading). **2. The simulated test:** it opens your page on a slow device and a slow network and gives you a score. The score is useful for comparison, but do not treat it as a goal in itself. We have seen sites scoring 95 that were slow for users, and the reverse. Test **mobile** first (most of your visitors are on it), and test an inner page, not only the home page. The tip that saved us weeks: **confirm what the largest element (LCP) is** before fixing anything. The tool tells you exactly which image or text. Once we were compressing the heaviest image on a page, and the largest element turned out to be a small background in a different section nobody had noticed. We fixed it with one line and the page improved more than from everything before it. ## The five causes we see ### 1. Images The most common by a wide margin. Photos straight from the camera at megabytes each, uncompressed, not in a modern format (WebP or AVIF), and all loading from the first second including the ones at the bottom of the page. **The fix:** compress every image, use a modern format, size them for mobile, and lazy-load the ones below the fold. One exception to lazy loading: the top image (LCP) must load first. ### 2. Fonts Heavy Arabic fonts loaded from an external server, sometimes four weights when you use two. The page waits for them before showing text. **The fix:** two or three weights only, hosted on your own domain, and a setting that shows text in a fallback font until the real one arrives. ### 3. Scripts Analytics tracking, ad pixels, the chat widget, maps, embedded video. Each arrives as code from another server, and all of them run before the visitor sees anything. **The fix:** defer what is not essential until the page is complete, and remove what nobody uses. Careful: some deferral tools only work with a specific setting, and you assume they are working when they are not. We have seen this ourselves. ### 4. Hosting Crowded shared hosting, or a server on another continent while your visitors are in Saudi Arabia. Every request travels far and back. And on shared hosting, another site on the same server can slow yours without you knowing. **The fix:** hosting near your visitors or a CDN, and page caching so the server does not build the page from scratch for every visitor. If you run WordPress on shared hosting, page caching alone turns the page from seconds to fractions of a second for ordinary visitors. ### 5. The build itself Sites that rely on JavaScript for everything: the page arrives empty and then code draws the content. Slow for the visitor, slower for Google. This is the same as reason two in [why your website is not on Google](https://www.kerneltics.com/blog/why-your-website-is-not-on-google). **The fix:** content arrives with the page (pre-rendering or server-side rendering), and the code runs after. ## The order we fix things in 1. **The largest element (LCP):** confirm what it is, and make it load first. 2. **Images:** compression, format and lazy loading. 3. **Caching:** for pages and for static files. 4. **Scripts:** defer and remove. 5. **Fonts.** 6. **Hosting:** last, because it is the most expensive, and the four before it are usually enough. After each step, measure again. And make sure you are measuring a fresh version, not the old cached one, because that fooled us once and cost a day. ## Things not worth it - **A score of 100.** The difference between 85 and 100 is not felt by the visitor, and sometimes costs more than it is worth. - **Rebuilding the whole site** for speed before trying the five above. - **Several "speed-up" plugins** stacked on each other. One configured well beats three that conflict. ## The short version Before you pay anyone to speed up your site: measure it on PageSpeed Insights from mobile, find out what the largest element is, and see which of the five (images, fonts, scripts, hosting, build) is your cause. Most sites improve visibly from images and caching alone. If you measure and hit a wall, [book a free consultation](https://www.kerneltics.com/book) and send us the link; we will tell you the cause and what is worth fixing.