How do I speed up my website?
The short answer
On a small business site, almost all of it is images. Photographs uploaded straight from a phone or a camera are often several megabytes each, and a page with eight of them can take ten seconds on mobile data. Fix the images first and most sites are done. After that it is fonts, third-party embeds and hosting, roughly in that order of likely impact.
On this page
Test it properly first
Before changing anything, find out whether you actually have a problem, and measure it the way your customers experience it.
On a phone. On mobile data. Not on office wifi. This is the whole test, and it is the step people skip. Your site on a desktop connected to the same network as the server will feel instant regardless of how slow it is for the person standing in a car park.
The threshold that matters is about three seconds to the point where the page is usable. Beyond that you lose a meaningful share of visitors before anything loads, and they leave without ever knowing what they left.
Cause one: images, which is almost always the answer
A photograph off a modern phone is commonly four to eight megabytes. A page with eight of them is fifty megabytes, and on mobile data that is not a slow page, it is a broken one.
Three things fix nearly all of it:
Resize before uploading. An image displayed 800 pixels wide does not need to be 6000 pixels wide. The browser downloads the whole thing and then shrinks it, so the visitor pays for every pixel they never see.
Compress. Quality around 80 per cent is visually indistinguishable from the original for photographs and routinely cuts the file to a fifth of its size.
Use a modern format. WebP is well supported now and is substantially smaller than JPEG at the same quality.
If you do nothing else on this page, do this. On most small business sites it is the difference between six seconds and two.
Cause two: fonts
Every custom font is a file the browser has to fetch before it can draw the text, and loading four weights of two families is four to eight files.
Use one or two families, only the weights you actually use, and make sure text stays visible while the font loads rather than the page sitting blank waiting for it. That last detail is a one-line setting and it is frequently wrong.
Cause three: third-party embeds
This is the one that surprises people, because none of it looks like it belongs to you.
An embedded map, a chat widget, a video player, a social feed, an analytics tag, a cookie banner, a review widget. Each pulls in code from someone else's server, and one slow third party stalls your page regardless of how well built the rest of it is.
Audit them honestly. Most sites are carrying at least one embed that was added for a campaign three years ago and never removed. An embedded map in particular is usually replaceable with a static image and a link — visitors want directions, not an interactive map they will never drag.
Worth noting that Helm's own analytics adds no cookie banner obligation, since it uses no cookies for tracking identity — which removes one of the heavier embeds on a typical small business site. The reasoning is in do I need a cookie banner.
Cause four: hosting
Real, and last on the list because it is far less often the problem than people assume — and because it is the most expensive to change on a guess.
Signs it genuinely is the hosting: the page is slow even with a nearly empty cache and small images, the first byte takes over a second consistently, or the site slows down noticeably at busy times. If none of those are true, changing host will not help you, and you will have spent a migration to find that out. See should I host my website in Lebanon for what actually matters in that choice.
What not to bother with
Chasing a perfect score in a speed testing tool. Those tools grade against a technical ideal, not against your competitors. Getting from a poor score to a decent one is worth real money; getting from decent to perfect is usually a week spent on something no customer will notice.
Removing content that earns its place. A page is not slow because it says too much. It is slow because of how the things on it are delivered.
What this looks like in Helm
Two parts, and only one of them is Helm's job.
The build handles the structural half: pages ship as real HTML so there is nothing to assemble before text appears, images are served in modern formats at appropriate sizes, and the certificate, caching and delivery network are part of the hosting rather than things you configure.
The other half stays yours, and it is the one that decays. Photographs get added over the years and never removed, and a gallery that grew to forty images is slow no matter how well the site was built. That is why images being a field you control matters — removing one has to be as cheap as adding one, or the page only ever gets heavier. See how many photos should my website have.
The short version
Test on a phone on mobile data. Fix the images — resize, compress, modern format — and most sites are finished there. Then trim your fonts and audit your embeds. Only look at hosting once you have ruled the other three out, because it is the expensive guess.