Why is my website slow, and how do I get a 90+ PageSpeed score?

Your website opens instantly on your office Wi-Fi. Your customer opens it on a mid-range phone, on mobile data, in a lift, and stares at a white screen. Then they press back and call the next result. Speed is the most common problem I find on business websites, and one of the easiest to measure.

The short answer#

Test your speed in 2 minutes#

1. Open pagespeed.web.dev, paste your website address and press Analyze.
2. Look at the Mobile tab first. That is how most of your customers see you, and what Google uses for ranking.
3. At the top, “Discover what your real users are experiencing” shows Core Web Vitals from real Chrome users, if your site has enough visitors. Below it, the score out of 100 is a lab test on a simulated slow phone.
4. Scroll to Diagnostics. It lists what is slowing the page down, roughly in order of impact.

Repeat for your most important service page, not just the home page.

What the score and Core Web Vitals mean#

The score is a useful health check. The Core Web Vitals from real users are what Google actually uses as a ranking signal.

Does speed affect Google ranking?#

Yes, but it is a tie-breaker, not a trump card. Google uses Core Web Vitals as part of its page experience signals. A fast page about the wrong thing won't outrank a slower page that answers the search better. But between two similar pages, the faster one has an edge (speed is one part of SEO, AEO and GEO), and Google has said page experience matters more when many pages are equally relevant.

The bigger cost is people. Every extra second on a phone is a chance for the visitor to give up before they see your phone number or price. Speed is as much about getting enquiries as about ranking.

The usual causes#

• Huge images. A 4 MB photo straight from the phone, shown at the width of a business card. This alone is the most common cause.
• Too much JavaScript. Page builders, sliders, animation libraries, and every plugin or app add code the phone must download and run.
• Third-party widgets.Chat bubbles, review widgets, Facebook and Instagram embeds, multiple analytics and ad trackers. Each loads its own scripts from someone else's server.
• Slow or distant hosting. Cheap shared hosting, or a server in the US for a business whose customers are all in India, with no CDN.
• Render-blocking fonts and CSS. Several font families and weights that must download before any text appears.
• No caching. Every visit rebuilds the page from scratch on the server.

9 fixes, in order of impact#

1. Resize and compress images. Serve WebP or AVIF, sized for the space they fill, and lazy-load images below the first screen. On image-heavy sites this is often the biggest single improvement.
2. Give the main image priorityand set width and height on every image, so the page doesn't jump while loading (fixes CLS).
3. Remove what you don't use. Old plugins, sliders nobody watches, a second analytics tool, a chat widget nobody answers.
4. Load third-party scripts late. Chat, reviews and trackers can load after the page is visible, or when someone scrolls to them.
5. Use fewer fonts. One family, two weights, self-hosted, with font-display: swap so text shows immediately.
6. Turn on caching and a CDN.Most hosts offer it; Cloudflare's free plan works for many small sites.
7. Move to better hostingwith servers in or near India, if the server itself responds slowly (look for “Reduce initial server response time” in PageSpeed).
8. Split heavy JavaScript. Load code only on pages that need it. In React and Next.js, use dynamic imports and server rendering.
9. Rebuild if the foundation is the problem. If a heavy theme or builder is the cause, no plugin will fix it. A lightweight hand-built site is often cheaper than months of patching.

Wix, WordPress and builder sites#

WordPress: a caching plugin, an image optimisation plugin, a lightweight theme and removing unused plugins usually help a lot. Page builders like Elementor add weight; a lean theme helps more than any plugin.

Wix, Squarespace and AI builders:you can't change much of the underlying code. Compress images before uploading, remove apps and animations you don't need, and keep pages short. If the score is still poor, that is the platform's limit.

If you're weighing a rebuild, read Next.js vs WordPress for a small business website. I build fast sites in Next.js and fix slow React apps; see my React and Next.js developer page, or send me your website addressand I'll tell you what is slowing it down.