Fast for you, slow for everyone else: why

You open your site and it appears in a blink. A customer says it drags. You are both right, because you are not looking at the same thing. Whoever runs a site almost always has advantages the visitor does not: the browser has already stored half the page, the connection is good, the session is logged in, and the computer already knows where the server is. To know what the visitor sees, you have to look the way they look.

The most common causes

Cause Why it misleads How to confirm
Your browser cache On the first visit the browser downloads everything. On later ones, almost nothing. You always make “later ones”. Open the site in a private window: that is the “first visit”.
A warm page cache The first person to ask for a page after it was cleared gets the version built from scratch. Request the same page twice and compare. See LiteSpeed Cache.
Network and distance Your connection, or your office’s, can be far better than a visitor on mobile data, or in another country. Test on a phone using mobile data, off the Wi-Fi.
Being logged in Some sites show people with a session something different (or at a different speed) from the anonymous visitor. View the site in a private window, logged out.
An ad blocker If yours blocks chat widgets, ads and trackers, your page has less to load than the visitor’s. Switch off browser extensions, or use a private window with none.
Time of day The slowness may only happen at certain hours, when more people visit or scheduled tasks run. Measure at different hours and keep notes.

Seeing the site as the visitor does, step by step

1 Private window, no extensions, and open the page. That is what a new visitor saw.
2 Another device, another network. A phone on mobile data is the most honest test. Ask someone in another city to open the site and tell you how it feels.
3 Time the server’s response, with no browser in between. In a terminal: curl -o /dev/null -s -w "dns %{time_namelookup} connect %{time_connect} first-byte %{time_starttransfer} total %{time_total}\n" https://asuaempresa.co.mz/Run it three times. If “first-byte” varies a lot, the page is being rebuilt on some visits: that is a caching matter.
4 Compare real data with lab tests. In PageSpeed Insights, the field data panel (real visitors) can contradict the lab test. See Core Web Vitals in plain words.
5 Look at the path to the server, if you suspect the network: reading a traceroute and a ping.
Do not change plan before you know the cause. If the problem is a huge picture on the home page, a bigger plan does not make it lighter. Measure first: what to measure before you change plan.
If the slowness only shows at certain hours, look at what the site does at those hours: plugin backups, imports, scheduled tasks. What eats CPU on a website explains where to look. And for where the servers are and what that changes for people visiting from far away, see where our servers are.

Already tested in a private window and on a phone, and the site is still slow only for some people? Send us the address, the time and the test result, and we will look at the server side.

Open a support ticket

SEE ALSO

The site is slow: what actually makes a difference

Measuring your site speed

Clearing the cache: the browser’s, the computer’s, and the site’s

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