Why your site is slow — and the 20% that fixes it.

When a site takes three seconds to load, everyone assumes the fix is a rewrite. It usually isn't. In the audits we run, four culprits account for most of the damage — and most are an afternoon of work, not a quarter.

1. Images shipped at the wrong size

The most common finding, by a mile: a 4,000-pixel photo squeezed into a 400-pixel card, on every page. Modern formats and responsive sizing routinely cut page weight by half or more. It is the least glamorous fix in web development and the single most effective one.

2. Third-party scripts nobody remembers adding

Analytics, chat widgets, heat maps, that A/B tool from a campaign two years ago. Each one costs a network round-trip before your content shows up. We regularly find sites carrying a dozen — audit them, cut the ones nobody checks, and defer the rest.

3. Fonts that block the page

Custom fonts loaded badly hold the entire page hostage until they arrive. The fixes — preloading, sensible fallbacks, font-display — are one line each. Most sites just never set them.

4. Template and builder bloat

Themes and page builders ship code for every feature you might use, and you pay for all of it on every visit. This is the one culprit that sometimes does justify a rebuild — but only after the first three are fixed, because sometimes they're enough on their own.

Measure first, always

Every fix above is measurable before and after. That's the standard to hold anyone to — including us: numbers first, then work, then the same numbers again. If someone proposes a rebuild without showing you the measurements, ask for the measurements.