The Hidden Bloat That's Killing Your Google Rankings

Websites get slower over the years because things get added and never properly removed. Old fonts, duplicate analytics code, scripts from plugins you've deleted, and photos far bigger than they need to be all load on every page, even though none of it shows. You can find it in five minutes with PageSpeed Insights.

My mum's website was the example that taught me this. It was loading eleven fonts, and its mobile score was 19 out of 100.

What was slowing her site down?

She runs yoga classes in Surrey. The site looked fine. It took about six seconds to load on a phone, and she'd noticed fewer people finding her when they searched for yoga classes near them.

When I ran it through PageSpeed Insights, it scored 34 on desktop and 19 on mobile. Underneath, on every page load, it was fetching:

• 11 font files. Three were duplicates, two came from a theme she'd stopped using years before, and one was a font she'd never heard of.
• 3 analytics scripts. Google Analytics twice, somehow, plus a platform analytics script she didn't know existed.
• A dead cookie banner. The company behind it had shut down, and the script kept trying to reach a server that no longer existed.
• A 4MB photo at the top of the page that could have been around 200KB.
• Code from widgets she'd already deleted. The widgets were gone. Their code was still loading.

None of it was visible. It only made the site slow.

Why do websites get slower over time?

Because builders and plugins make adding things easy and removing them hard. Every widget you try, every theme you test and every "install this for better SEO" plugin can leave something behind. Over three or four years, a simple site builds up layers of it. This happens on any platform, WordPress with plugins most of all, not only on builders.

Does speed affect Google rankings?

Google says its ranking systems reward pages that give a good page experience, and loading speed is part of that. It also affects people directly. Google's research found 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

How do I check my own website for bloat?

1. Run PageSpeed Insights. Paste your address into pagespeed.web.dev and look at the mobile score. Above 80 is good. Under 50 is a problem.
2. Read the diagnostics. Below the score, PageSpeed lists what's slowing the page: files that block it from appearing, unused JavaScript, and images bigger than they're shown. Anything you don't recognise is a candidate for removal.
3. Look at your images. A photo 2000 pixels wide shown in a space 400 pixels wide is wasted download on every visit.
4. List your plugins, apps and widgets. Remove anything you don't use, then check the code went with it.

What did I do about my mum's site?

Finding the problems took an evening. Cleaning it up on the old platform helped, but it crept back every time something new was added. So I rebuilt it as a simple site with no page builder and no plugins, with the same words and photos.

The new mobile score was 99. Within about three weeks she was back on the first page for yoga classes in Surrey, and enquiries picked up again. That's one site, not a study, but it's the clearest before-and-after I've seen.

What should I do if my site is slow?

If it's a few big images or scripts, fix them, or ask whoever built the site to. If it keeps getting slow again, a simpler rebuild is usually cheaper than chasing it every year. A four-page site from me is £300, built to load in about a second on a phone.

Not sure which it is? Send it for a free website check and I'll record a short video showing what's slowing it down. More on the wider basics in SEO is not magic.