Five quick wins to speed up a small business website

Most slow sites are slow for the same few reasons. These are the fixes that make the biggest difference for the least effort.

A slow website costs you visitors before they have read a word. The good news is that most small business sites are held back by the same handful of problems, and they are usually quick to fix.

Start with images. A single photo straight from a phone can be larger than the rest of the page put together. Resize it to the size it is shown at, save it in a modern format such as WebP, and load images below the fold only when they are scrolled to.

Next, look at what else loads. Every chat widget, tracking script and font adds weight. Remove anything you do not use, and load the rest after the page is usable. Finally, check your hosting: a fast host with caching switched on can halve the time it takes for the first byte to arrive.

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