Posted by Courtney Fappiano on October 20th, 2026You pull up your site to check out your latest post/update and its taking forever to load. You refresh and it partially loads for 15 seconds then fully populates. Frustrating, but hey the site has loaded. Well that may work for you, because it’s your website and you are committed, but what about the curious internet surfer that wants to learn more about your services or get in touch?
In our 15 years of working in this industry we have found that people generally stay on a website for under 1 minute, with typical averages ranging from 15 seconds to 54 seconds per visit. Did you see that first part? 15 seconds. If your site is not loading fast enough, it is very likely that your potential customer, client, colleague will bounce off to another, faster loading site.
Luckily you have us: your friendly and helpful Digital Marketing wizards to tell you what to do.
Things That Cause Bad Site Speed Scores:
A Bloated Theme
Not like your website had too much to eat but…kinda. Every time you install a WordPress theme or plugin, you’re adding more code that affects how your site looks and behaves. Some themes come packed with features, scripts, and design options you may never use, which can slow down your site and consume more server resources. The more unnecessary code your theme has to load, the harder your site has to work, potentially hurting performance and load times.
You have A Lot Of Plugins
Yes you typically need plugins, but do you need all of the current ones that are installed on your site? More often than not we find that websites can shed a few plugins. When you have too many plugins that can cause your site to load slowly and can cause compatibility issues. You will want to go through your plugins and see what can go. But be careful- If you remove an essential plugin things could come crashing down. So be sure to ask a professional if you are wading into deep, unfamiliar waters.
Your Images Are Huge
We see this a lot. Every image on the site can be printed on a billboard and maintain its quality (an exaggeration but you get our point). A way-too-big image for a website typically exceeds 2,400 to 4,000+ pixels wide in dimensions and weighs several megabytes (2 MB to 10+ MB). You don’t need that. To fix this, you can crop or scale your image down to match the actual display space on the page (e.g., 1,200px wide for content or 1,920px wide for full-bleed banners) or install a plugin that compresses the images so you don’t have to!
Out of date PHP versions (Your Site Is Old)
We’ve seen small business owners running the same website for 15 years, and it doesn’t look good or work well. Older WordPress sites may use outdated PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), which processes code less efficiently and is less secure. Some sites can be saved by updating PHP, while others reach the *actively dying* stage, where edits, new pages, and plugins stop working. At that point, investing in a new site is usually the best option.
Like all languages, PHP evolves over time, with improvements and outdated features being phased out. When older themes and plugins rely on deprecated code, it can cause performance issues, errors, or even a full site crash.
Call us about your slow site, I promise we can help.
