How to Fix a Slow Website (Complete Series)
A five‑part guide that shows you how to diagnose slow websites and fix the most common performance issues using the tools you already have — your browser.
Thu Nov 13 2025 • 3 min read
Most people don’t find out their site is slow from a report. They feel it.
A page that used to “just open” suddenly hesitates. The hero image appears a beat too late. A button needs that extra half‑second before it reacts. Nothing is obviously broken, but it also doesn’t feel right.
This series explains why that happens — and shows you how to fix it.
The Idea Behind This Guide
If you understand what the browser is doing, most performance advice stops being mysterious.
A long bar in the Network panel stops being “some request” and becomes “the hero image that’s blocking everything.” A thick yellow block in the Performance timeline stops being “JavaScript” and becomes “the chat widget that freezes the page for a moment.”
Once you see these things clearly, fixing them becomes far less stressful. You’re no longer guessing or copying checklists; you know which part of your site is responsible for what you feel as slowness.
You can read this page as an overview on its own, or dive into each part when you’re ready to work on that specific layer.
1. Seeing What the Browser Sees
First, we learn how to diagnose problems using DevTools. The goal is not to turn you into a developer, but to give you a clearer picture of what’s happening:
- Which files are large.
- Which ones take the longest.
- Where JavaScript gets in the way.
- How layout shifts appear in practice.
This is where you stop relying on hunches and start working with real signals from the browser.
👉 Read Part 1 – Diagnose Problems Using The Browser
2. The Weight of Images
Next, we look at images — often the biggest and easiest win.
You’ll see how oversized dimensions, heavy formats, and small quality decisions add up. More importantly, you’ll learn how to spot when an image is quietly doing too much work, and how to fix it without needing a designer or a new stack of tools.
👉 Read Part 2 – Image Issues That Make Your Site Heavy
3. Scripts You Don’t See but Always Feel
The third layer is JavaScript and third‑party scripts.
These don’t show up visually, but they decide how quickly your page reacts. A single long‑running script can make a site feel sticky even when everything else looks fine. This part shows how to find those scripts, understand what they’re doing, and make practical decisions about what to keep, defer, or remove.
👉 Read Part 3 – Third‑Party Scripts That Block Your Pages
4. Shaping the First Second
Then we move to loading strategy — the part where performance meets perception.
Two sites can have similar scores and still feel very different. One shows real content immediately and stays stable; the other keeps shifting or delaying meaningful content. This article is about that gap: what appears above the fold, how stable it is, and how to let the browser work in the background while the visitor reads.
👉 Read Part 4 – Loading Strategy
5. Letting Work Be Reused
Finally, we get to caching — how browsers and servers remember work they’ve already done.
First visits will always cost something. But repeat visits, and even many first visits, can be dramatically faster if the browser can reuse files and the server can reuse pre‑rendered pages. This last part ties everything together at the infrastructure level.
👉 Read Part 5 – Browser & Server Caching
How to Read This as a Standalone Guide
You don’t have to consume all five parts at once.
If you’re just starting, read Part 1 and then come back to this page. You’ll already see your site differently. Heavy images, busy scripts, and unstable layouts will stop being vague complaints and become specific, fixable issues.
From there, move to the parts that match what you’ve seen:
- If your waterfall is full of large JPGs or PNGs → jump to images.
- If the Performance panel is mostly yellow → look at scripts.
- If the first screen feels empty or jumpy → focus on loading strategy.
- If repeat visits always feel like first visits → explore caching.
This page remains your map.
