Five Ways to Speed Up a Slow Website

Slow sites lose visitors before the headline loads. The good news: most slowness comes from five familiar culprits, and four of them are fixed in your app — not by buying a bigger server. Work through this list in order.

1. Shrink your images

Oversized photos are the number-one cause of slow pages we see. Export at the size displayed, prefer modern formats, and compress — a hero image should weigh hundreds of kilobytes, never megabytes.

2. Turn on caching

Page caching serves repeat visitors instantly, and browser caching keeps assets on their devices. On Emberlane shared hosting this is one toggle; the difference is often a full second.

3. Hunt the slow queries

One unindexed database query can stall every page it touches. Your monitoring dashboard shows query time per endpoint — fix the worst offender first and whole sections of the site speed up together.

4. Shed the plugin weight

Every plugin, widget and tracking script adds requests. Audit ruthlessly: if a script does not earn its place in conversions or insight, remove it and watch the waterfall chart shrink.

5. Move to SSD hosting

Once the app is lean, the floor becomes disk speed. SSD-only storage — standard on every Emberlane plan — cuts database reads and file serving to a fraction of spinning-disk times.

Run through all five and measure again. If the numbers still disappoint, send us the report — our engineers read waterfall charts for fun.