Your site probably feels fine on your office Wi-Fi. Your customers are often on a phone, on mobile data, standing in a parking lot. That's where a heavy site falls apart, and where people give up and tap the next result.
Check your own site in two minutes
Before changing anything, measure it. Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool tests any address and shows how it performs on mobile, with a list of what's slowing it down. Run your homepage through it and look at the mobile results, not desktop.
Where the weight comes from
Oversized images
The most common culprit by far. A photo straight from a camera or phone can be several megabytes, then shown in a box a few hundred pixels wide. The phone downloads all of it anyway.
Too many scripts
Chat widgets, pop-ups, sliders, tracking tags, social feeds. Each one adds code the phone has to download and run before the page settles. Many sites carry scripts for tools nobody uses anymore.
Builders and page-builder plugins
Drag-and-drop tools are built to handle every possible layout, so they load code for features your page doesn't use. Years of plugins added on top make it worse.
Too many fonts
Every font weight and style is a separate file. Four families in several weights adds up quickly.
Video that autoplays
A background video can be heavier than the rest of the page combined.
What actually fixes it
- Resize and compress images to the size they're actually shown, and use modern formats like WebP or AVIF.
- Load images lazily, so photos further down the page only load when someone scrolls to them.
- Remove scripts you don't need. For each widget, ask: does this bring in customers? If not, it goes.
- Use fewer fonts, or system fonts that are already on the phone.
- Replace autoplay video with a still image and a play button.
- Rebuild from scratch when the site is built on a heavy builder or years of plugins. Sometimes trimming isn't enough, and starting clean is faster and cheaper than patching.
Why we hand-write sites
This is the main reason Northcraft doesn't use templates or page builders. When a page is written by hand for one business, nothing is on it by default. Every image, script and font is there because it earns its place.
You don't need us to fix a slow site. The list above works for any website. But if you'd like to see what yours could feel like, that's exactly what the free concept is for.