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simonantony
Hosting, performance and support

Why is our Umbraco website so slow?

The short answer

Almost certainly not because it is Umbraco. The platform itself is fast; slow Umbraco sites are slow because of how they were built or where they are hosted. The culprits we find most often are inefficient content queries that do far more work than the page needs, images uploaded at full camera resolution and never resized, caching that was never configured, too many third-party scripts, and hosting that was sized for the site at launch rather than the site today. The good news is that these are findable and fixable without a rebuild. Our audit and performance service measures where the time actually goes, fixes the biggest offenders first, and shows you the before and after numbers rather than asking you to take improvement on trust.

Slow is a symptom with a short list of usual suspects. After working on Umbraco sites since 2011, we can say the list barely changes; only the mix does.

The usual suspects

Why it matters commercially

Speed is not cosmetic. Slow pages lose visitors before they load, convert worse when they do, and rank lower in search because Google measures real user experience. A slow site quietly taxes every marketing pound you spend driving people to it.

How we fix it

Measure first, then fix in order of impact. Our audit and performance optimisation service profiles where the time goes on your specific site, then works through the offenders, biggest first, with before and after measurements at each step. Most sites see the majority of the gain from a handful of fixes, which is why we do not start by proposing a rebuild. If the hosting itself is the bottleneck, our managed hosting puts the site on infrastructure sized for how it is used now.

Get your site audited →