Speed is not vanity. Slow pages bleed mobile buyers quietly, and you never see the sales that left. After auditing many stores, the same seven problems explain almost every slow one we meet — in roughly this order.
1. Images doing the most damage
The classic: a 4 MB photo squeezed into a 400-pixel card. Compress everything, serve modern formats (WebP/AVIF), and size images for their actual display slot. This one fix often halves page weight on its own.
2. App and plugin graveyards
Every app injects scripts — and many keep injecting them after you stop using the app, or even after you uninstall it. Audit the list quarterly: each one earns its place or goes, and removed apps get their leftover code stripped from the theme.
3. A theme carrying five years of scar tissue
Old sliders, abandoned customizations, three font families, page-builder layers on page-builder layers. Sometimes the honest fix is a cleanup pass; sometimes it is admitting the theme is the problem.
4. No caching (WooCommerce especially)
Without page caching, every visitor makes your server rebuild the page from scratch. A properly configured cache plus a CDN is the cheapest speed upgrade in commerce — and misconfigured caching that logs users out or shows stale carts is the most common way it goes wrong. Configure, then test like a customer.
5. Fonts blocking the paint
Custom fonts loaded badly hold the whole page hostage. Two families maximum, preloaded, with font-display: swap so text renders immediately.
6. Redirect chains
http → https → www → final page: each hop is a full round trip before anything loads, and mobile networks feel every one. One clean 301 to the final URL, always.
7. Hosting that was never meant for commerce
The cheapest shared hosting is fine for a hobby blog and misery for a store under real traffic. If the first six fixes are done and the server response time is still slow, the host is the bottleneck — move.
How to know where you stand
Test three pages — home, one collection, one product — on PageSpeed Insights, and read the mobile numbers, not desktop. Fix in the order above; measure after each change so you know what actually moved. That measured before/after discipline is exactly how our speed package works, and it is why it comes with numbers instead of adjectives.