1. Images straight off a camera
This is the cause about eight times in ten. A photograph from a phone is often four to eight megabytes and several thousand pixels wide. Displayed in a box 600 pixels across, the browser still downloads every one of those bytes first.
The fix: resize before uploading. Nothing on a normal page needs to be wider than about 2000 pixels; most things need far less. Export as a modern format if your platform supports it, and let images below the fold load lazily. One afternoon of this often halves a page's weight.
2. Everything you bolted on
A chat widget, two analytics tools, a heatmap recorder, a cookie banner to consent to the first three, a social feed, a review widget and a font loader. Each one is a separate connection to a separate company's server, and each can block the page while it thinks.
The fix: open the list and be ruthless. For each item ask when you last acted on what it told you. The heatmap you installed in 2024 and looked at twice is costing every visitor real time, forever.
This site makes zero external requests. No analytics, no fonts from someone else's server, no chat widget, no advertising pixels — which is also why it needs no cookie banner. That is a deliberate choice, and the audit script I run refuses to pass a build that quietly adds one.
3. A theme built to demo well
Multipurpose themes ship with sliders, parallax, animation libraries and six page builders' worth of options, because they are sold to people browsing a marketplace. You use perhaps four percent of it. The rest still loads.
The fix: honestly, this is the hard one, because you cannot subtract much from a theme without breaking it. It is the most common reason a rebuild ends up cheaper than an optimisation project.
4. Fonts
Four custom families, each in several weights, each fetched from a third party before any text can appear. That is why some pages sit blank for a beat and then flash into existence.
The fix: one or two families, two or three weights, self-hosted, with a sensible fallback so text is readable while they load. Or use the fonts already on the reader's device — they cost nothing and render instantly, which is what this site does.
Keep it in proportion
Speed is a real factor in how people experience a site and it is one input among many for search. It is not a ranking cheat code. A fast page with nothing to say will lose to a slower page that answers the question.
Fix the images, remove what you do not use, then go and write something worth reading. In that order.