"The site is slow" can mean a dozen different things. Ten minutes of narrowing down usually identifies the cause, and it always makes a support ticket faster to resolve.
First: slow for whom?
Test from a different network — a phone on mobile data is ideal. If the site is fast there and slow in your office, the problem is your internet connection, your DNS resolver or something on your local network, and nothing on the server will fix it.
Then test from a third-party speed testing service, which measures from outside both your network and ours. If that reports a fast load while your browser feels slow, the difference is local.
Second: slow always, or slow sometimes?
Consistent slowness points at the application: an unoptimised database query, a heavy page, an oversized image. Intermittent slowness points at load, a scheduled job, or an external service the page waits on.
Note the times. "Slow every morning at nine" and "slow at random" lead to completely different investigations.
Third: what part is slow?
Open the browser's developer tools, go to the network tab and reload. You will see each request and how long it took. Three patterns cover most cases:
- The first request (the HTML document) is slow, everything else is fast. The server is taking time to generate the page. This is a server or application problem.
- The first request is fast but the page takes ages to finish. Too many assets, or oversized images. Sort by size and look at the biggest ones.
- One specific request hangs. Usually a third-party script — analytics, chat widget, ad tag, embedded font. Your page is waiting on somebody else's server. Removing or deferring it fixes the symptom immediately.
Fourth: the quick wins that are almost always available
- Images. Photographs uploaded straight from a phone or camera are frequently several megabytes and displayed at a few hundred pixels. Resizing and compressing them is the single highest-impact change on most small sites.
- Caching. If the site runs a content management system and has no caching layer, every visitor triggers a full page rebuild.
- Plugins and extensions. Disable them one at a time on a staging copy. There is often exactly one responsible.
- Database maintenance. Tables full of revisions, spam comments and expired transient data slow down every query.
What to include in the ticket
If you still need us, send: the exact page address that is slow, what you measured and from where, whether it is constant or intermittent with times, a screenshot of the network tab, and anything that changed recently. A ticket with that content gets a real answer on the first reply; one that says "site is slow" gets a request for this information.
