Slow website: the day ours dropped to 37

A slow website quietly scares visitors away before they ever reach out to you. That’s exactly what happened to us one Sunday morning in August, at Meriaky. Our own website, meriaky.com, took more than 12 seconds to load on a phone. Google’s speed score: 37 out of 100.

No recent updates. No visible bug in the code. Nothing we had touched the day before. And yet the site was crawling. We felt a little ridiculous, to be honest: a slow website, and we hadn’t even seen it coming.

Here’s what happened, what we found, and what it means for you if you’ve never actually checked your own website’s speed.

One Sunday morning, our slow website caught us off guard

It started with a simple habit: a routine test on PageSpeed Insights, Google’s free tool. The number came back: 37 out of 100 on mobile, because the page took more than 12 seconds to load.

We looked for the obvious culprit first. A badly coded plugin, maybe, or one that broke after an update. But digging through the code and comparing it to the day before, nothing had changed.

So the real culprit was somewhere else. It was the cache, the layer that serves visitors a saved copy of the site so pages load faster. That day, though, it was serving outdated copies that were stepping on each other: several versions of the site were showing up at once, out of sync.

Nobody calls to tell you your website is slow

This is the most uncomfortable part of the story. A visitor who waits 12 seconds doesn’t send you a message to complain: they close the tab and click on the next competitor in the Google results.

From where you sit, you just see a drop. Fewer requests this month, fewer calls. So the easiest explanation to reach for is the market: “things are just quiet right now.”

But the market might have nothing to do with it. In reality, your website closes the door in silence, no alert, no signal, nothing pushing you to go check. A slow website, in plain terms, behaves exactly like a salesperson who locks up the shop without telling anyone.

How a website can slow down on its own, without you touching anything

This is the part we keep coming back to from that day: we hadn’t changed a thing. And yet the site degraded on its own.

A plugin update alone can be enough to slow a site down overnight. Another common case: a cache setting that drifts out of tune, like ours did. Or hosting that gets overloaded, because other sites on the same server start taking up more room. None of these require you to touch anything. A slow website can show up without a single alert appearing on your dashboard.

In other words, the storefront you paid for and had built can turn into a locked door without any alarm going off on your end. That’s exactly why we ended up measuring it ourselves, instead of assuming it was fine.

The common causes of a slow website in small businesses

In our case, it was the cache. But for most small businesses we talk to, the causes tend to repeat, so it’s worth knowing them ahead of time.

First, images that are too heavy: a photo taken on a phone, never compressed, dropped straight onto a page. Then, too many plugins installed over time, several of them doing the same job twice. Next, a cache poorly configured, like ours was that Sunday. Finally, budget hosting, chosen for its price rather than its capacity.

These four causes come up so often that we check them first, before looking any further.

How to test your own website speed in 10 minutes

Good news: you don’t need us to find out where you stand. PageSpeed Insights, Google’s free tool, gives you a score in seconds. Just paste in your website’s address. A slow website shows up within minutes, not after days of waiting.

Look at the MOBILE score first, not the desktop one. That’s where most of your visits come from, so that’s the number that actually matters.

Then test from your own phone, on mobile data, not the office wifi. Office wifi often lies to you: it’s faster than what your customers experience out in the real world. Run this test once a month. A site can slip in silence, exactly like ours did that Sunday in August.

The thresholds that actually matter

Under 3 seconds, your website is in good shape. Between 3 and 5 seconds, things get shaky, but it’s still workable. Past 5 seconds, you start losing people on every visit. And past 10 seconds, your website is a locked door, even if it looks great and is fully up to date.

In our case, we went from 12 seconds to 2.6 seconds in one day of diagnosing, clearing caches, and re-testing. The mobile score climbed back to 87 out of 100, and on desktop, we even hit 100.

A slow website often gets fixed faster than you’d think, as long as you actually measure it once, for real. We didn’t do anything technically complicated. Mostly, we measured, on a Sunday morning, instead of assuming everything was fine because nobody was complaining.

If you’d like us to take a look at your own website’s speed, reach out here. You don’t need to already have a known problem to ask the question.

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About the author

Edouard Vilver · Co-founder of Meriaky

Software engineer with 15 years of experience, including more than 7 years at the National Bank of Canada, where he rolled out electronic signatures and migrated systems to the cloud. Today, he helps small businesses automate their client follow-up and repetitive tasks with AI.

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