There is a particular kind of frustration that only happens in November. You have spent weeks getting your offers ready, the emails go out, people start clicking through, and your website picks that exact moment to crawl.
It is not bad luck. Most small business websites are perfectly fine on a quiet Tuesday and only show their weak spots when lots of people turn up at once. The good news is that the fixes are usually simple, and October gives you just enough time to do them calmly.
In my Christmas trading checklist I mentioned speed in passing. This post goes into it properly, so you can speed up your website yourself before the Black Friday and festive rush arrives.
Why sites slow down when they get busy
Every visit asks your hosting server to do some work: find the page, build it, and send every image, font and script down to the visitor’s phone. One visitor at a time, almost any setup copes. Fifty at once and the weaknesses add up.
The three usual culprits are:
- Heavy images that take ages to download, especially on mobile data.
- No caching, so your server rebuilds the same page from scratch for every single visitor.
- Hosting that has been outgrown, often picked on price years ago and never looked at since.
Plugins doing more than they need to can make all three worse, but those are the big ones.
Step one: find out where you actually stand
Before changing anything, get a baseline. Run your homepage and your busiest product or service page through PageSpeed Insights. It is free, it is Google’s own tool, and it tells you what is slowing things down in fairly plain language.
If you have Google Search Console set up, the Core Web Vitals report is worth a look too. It uses real visitor data rather than a one off test, so it shows you how the site behaves for actual customers.
Make a note of your scores. You will want to compare them after making changes, partly to check things worked and partly because it is satisfying.
Shrink your images (the quickest win)
Nine times out of ten, images are the biggest problem. A photo straight off a phone or a stock site can easily be 4 or 5MB, and your page might only display it at the size of a postcard.
A few habits that make a real difference:
- Resize images to roughly the size they will actually be shown, usually no wider than 2000 pixels for a full width banner and much smaller for everything else.
- Compress them before uploading. Free tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh do this in seconds.
- Use WebP where you can. WordPress supports it, and the files are noticeably lighter.
- Check your homepage slider. Five huge rotating images is a lot to ask of someone on a train.
If you have hundreds of old images already uploaded, an image optimisation plugin can compress them in bulk. Take a backup first. We recommend tools such as Smush or Imagify.
Turn on caching (and think about a CDN)
Caching means your site saves a ready made copy of each page and hands that out, instead of building it fresh every time. For a busy period this is the difference between your server breaking a sweat and barely noticing.
Many good hosts include caching already, so check your hosting dashboard before installing anything. If not, a reputable caching plugin will do the job. Set it up, then click around your site properly afterwards, including your basket and contact form, because caching can occasionally upset pages that need to stay dynamic.
What is a CDN?
A CDN (content delivery network) takes caching a step further. Normally every visitor pulls your images, scripts and pages from the one server your website lives on. A CDN keeps copies of those files on servers spread across the country and around the world, and serves each visitor from whichever one is closest to them.
That helps in two ways. Pages arrive faster because the data has less distance to travel, and your own server gets a breather because the CDN is doing most of the heavy lifting. When your Black Friday email lands in a few thousand inboxes at once, that second part really matters.
There are three common ways to get one:
- Through your host. Plenty of hosting packages include a CDN, sometimes switched off by default, so check your dashboard first.
- Through a plugin. Caching plugins such as WP Rocket can handle your caching and connect your site to a CDN in the same place.
- Externally, with a service like Cloudflare. It sits in front of your website whoever your host is, and its free plan is plenty for most small business sites.
You do not need all three. Pick one, and if your host already offers it, start there. If you would like to read a bit more, Cloudflare has a good plain English guide to what a CDN is and how it works.
Have an honest look at your hosting
This is the one people avoid, because it feels technical and a bit like admitting a mistake. It is neither. Your business has probably grown since you chose your hosting, and that is a good problem to have.
Signs you might have outgrown it include the site slowing down at the same times every week, PageSpeed flagging a slow server response time, or your host’s dashboard showing you hitting resource limits. If any of that rings a bell, my post on website hosting explained covers what the different options actually mean.
While you are in your hosting dashboard, look for a CDN option too. It is often included in your plan and just not switched on, which makes it one of the easiest speed wins going. If your host does not offer one, that is not a reason to move on its own, because a plugin or Cloudflare can fill the gap.
If you do switch, do it in October, not the week before Black Friday.
Tidy your plugins
Go through your plugin list and ask of each one: do I still use this? Old sliders, abandoned page builders, three plugins doing the same job. Deactivate and delete anything you do not need, then test the site. Fewer moving parts means less to load and less to go wrong.
Your October speed checklist
- Run PageSpeed Insights on your two most important pages and note the scores.
- Resize and compress your largest images, starting with the homepage.
- Check whether caching is switched on, and set it up if not.
- Look at your hosting dashboard for warnings or resource limits.
- Remove any plugins you no longer use.
- Re-run PageSpeed Insights and compare.
None of this needs a developer. An afternoon with a cup of tea will get most sites noticeably quicker.
Fancy a second pair of eyes?
If you have worked through the list and want someone to look over the results with you, or you would just like to talk it through before you start, I offer a free 30 minute brainstorming session. No pitch and no pressure, just a proper chat about what is worth doing before the busy season and what can wait until January. You can book a slot here.
And if you decide afterwards that you would rather hand it over, my website maintenance service is there as a backup, not a starting point.
