I Fixed My Own Slow Website. Here’s What I Learned.

I’ll be honest with you: for a while, my own website was slow. Like, really slow. (Yes, the web designer’s website. I know.)

There’s an old saying about the cobbler’s kids having no shoes, and it turns out it applies to designers too. I spend my days making sure client sites look great and work well, and my own site just kept getting bumped to the bottom of the to-do list. When I finally sat down and tested it on a phone, it was taking more than 6 seconds before anything showed up on the screen at all. Just a blank page, waiting.

So I rolled up my sleeves and fixed it, and I wanted to share what I found, because the things slowing my site down are the same things I see on a lot of small business websites.

Why a few seconds actually matters

It’s easy to think a few seconds isn’t a big deal, but on a phone it really is. Google has found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That’s more than half of the people who tapped on your site, gone before they ever saw what you do.

Google also pays attention to how quickly your pages show up for people, and it’s said that loading speed is part of what its ranking systems look at. Its own guidance is that the main content of a page should appear within about 2.5 seconds. So a slow site can actually cost you twice: once when people give up waiting, and again when it’s a little harder for them to find you in the first place. (If you’re newer to all this, my post on local SEO basics is a great place to start, and it’s a big part of the SEO work I do for clients.)

What was actually slowing me down

When I dug in, it wasn’t one big problem. It was a bunch of little things that had piled up over the years, which is pretty much always how it goes.

• Leftovers from old versions of my brand. When I rebranded, my old font setup never fully went away. One piece of it was loading an old font collection that didn’t even have any fonts in it anymore, so every visitor’s phone was waiting on something that did absolutely nothing.
• A theme doing way more than I needed. My site was built on a theme with lots of built-in extras, like sliders, pop-up galleries and icon sets. I wasn’t using most of them, but they were still loading on every single page.
• Fonts loading the slow way. Some of my fonts were coming from outside servers, and the page was waiting on them before it would show any text at all.
• Little files adding up. Plugins love to load their own bits of code everywhere, even on pages where they aren’t doing anything.

What I changed

• Turned on the performance settings already built into my page builder, so my fonts load from my own server and text shows up right away instead of waiting.
• Cleaned out the old font code left over from before my rebrand.
• Switched to a much lighter theme. My old one was loading around 460 KB of files on every page, and the new one loads about 11 KB. That’s not a typo!
• Told my plugins to stop loading their files on pages that don’t use them.
• Fixed a few small accessibility things while I was in there, like the text color on my blog cards and the spacing on a few links so they’re easier to tap on a phone. (WebAIM has a free contrast checker if you’d like to test your own colors.)

The results

Here’s where things landed on Google’s mobile speed test:

	Before	After
Time until anything shows up	6.3 seconds	2.7 seconds
Time until the main content shows up	6.3 seconds	2.9 seconds
Mobile performance score	60	91
Accessibility score	93	97
Best practices score	96	100

And honestly, my favorite part? The site looks exactly the same. Visitors just get there faster. My site runs on WordPress with a page builder, which people sometimes assume can’t be fast, so it’s been really fun to prove that wrong. It just takes a little cleanup and some regular care, and it’s something I pay attention to on every website I build. (If you’re still deciding where to build, here’s how I think about choosing the right website platform.)

What this means for your website

If your site has been around for a few years, there’s a good chance it’s carrying some of the same baggage mine was. The good news is that a lot of it can be fixed without starting over with a whole new design.

If you’re curious how your own site does, you can run it through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. Check the mobile results, since that’s how a lot of people will find you. And don’t panic if the number is lower than you’d like! The test uses a slower phone and connection on purpose, so think of it as a flashlight, not a report card.

Speed is also just one piece of the puzzle. If you want to know what else tends to quietly cost small businesses clients, I wrote about common website design mistakes, and big, unoptimized images are a speed issue all their own (more on that in your website photos are doing more work than you think).

Website speed FAQ

If you’d like a second set of eyes on your site’s speed, it’s exactly the kind of thing I keep an eye on with my hosting and maintenance clients, and I’d love to take a look at yours.