How quickly a website works is vitally important to its success. There are a million reasons why a website could be running slowly, but the following suggestions might put you on the path to diagnosing the bottleneck.
Firstly, you might find it useful to install a Chrome extension/plugin called yslow, which helps you analyze why a particular page is running slowly. It then gives the website a grade and suggestions about how it can be made faster.
Another useful tool is http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
This shows you the response time for a website, plus how big it is to download all the assets it requires. Obviously the more you need to download, the slower the site will be.
It's also worth checking the hosting your website is on. Often cheap hosting means you're sharing your hardware with lots of other websites. If you are on shared hardware and another website on your server is using all the machines resources, then your site, however well optimised it might be, will also run slower than it should.
Improving the performance of a website is often a slow task in itself as there can be so many different reasons behind a sites poor performance. But following the tips above will certainly help you get back up to speed.
We love working with clients to speed up their site, so if you'd like us to help speed up your site, contact us for a consultation.