Your service pages open quickly. The contact page is fine. The blog posts are fine. But the home page, the one in every ad, every business card and every Google listing, sits there loading while its slider, video and Instagram strip arrive one by one. When the homepage loads slowly and nothing else does, it is not bad luck. It is usually because the home page carries things no other page does.
The upside is that the site’s foundations are probably sound. The hosting can serve pages quickly, and caching is presumably doing its job elsewhere. What you are looking for is the extra baggage the home page picked up, usually one section at a time over a few years. Comparing the home page with an ordinary inner page is the quickest way to find it.
Start with a side-by-side comparison
The quickest way to see what makes the home page different is to measure it next to an ordinary inner page, such as a service page or an About page that is reasonably quick. Keep the conditions identical for both: one tool, one test region, one device profile, three runs each.
| What to compare | What a big gap suggests |
|---|---|
| Server response time | The home page takes longer to build, or is not being cached. |
| Total page size | Heavy images, video or large scripts that only the home page uses. |
| Number of requests | Extra sections, widgets and outside services. |
| Number of outside domains | Feeds, embeds, review widgets and maps loading from other servers. |
| Largest Contentful Paint and its element | A hero image, slider or video that is slow to appear. |
The same measurements are explained in more detail in our page speed guide, but for this job the table is enough. Write the numbers down. When you start removing or changing sections, you will want to know which change made the difference.
Why only the home page is slow: the usual suspects
Home pages tend to accumulate the same handful of features. Go through your own and tick off which ones you have.
A slider or carousel at the top
Sliders often load every slide’s image up front, plus their own script and styles, even though the visitor sees one slide at a time. They can also make the page jump as they initialise. If your home page opens with one, it is a prime suspect, and the post on whether sliders slow down a website looks at the cost and the alternatives in detail.
A large hero image or background
Even without a slider, the image at the top is often the largest single file on the home page, sometimes a photo uploaded at full camera resolution. Because it is the main thing a visitor sees first, how quickly it arrives decides how fast the page feels.
Video
An autoplaying background video, or one or more embedded videos further down the page, adds a lot of weight. A YouTube embed loads the player’s scripts and styles from Google’s servers before anyone presses play; several embeds multiply that. How YouTube embeds slow a page and how to load them on click covers the usual fix.
Social feeds and review widgets
Instagram grids, Facebook page boxes, Google review carousels and similar widgets fetch scripts and content from outside servers, often a lot of them. They are popular on home pages because they look lively, and they are frequently the slowest part of the page.
“Latest” sections
Latest posts, latest products, featured projects, testimonials, team members, upcoming events. Each section is usually a separate database query, sometimes several, and each pulls in its own images. A home page with six such sections can ask the database far more questions than any inner page.
Animations, counters and effects
Number counters, scroll animations, parallax backgrounds and animated icons each tend to bring their own script, and they are often added through a page builder’s extra widget packs. Individually small, together they keep a phone busy.
Maps, popups and chat
An embedded Google Map, a welcome popup and a chat widget are commonly set to appear on the home page only, or to appear there first. All three load from outside servers.
When the server is the slow part
If your comparison showed a longer server response time for the home page, look at caching and at how much the page has to work out before it can be sent.
- Check the home page is cached. Some caching plugins have a separate setting for the front page, and some sites have it excluded by accident, for example after a troubleshooting session. Look at the response headers for a cache hit.
- Look for anything that changes per visit. Random testimonials, a visitor’s location, a live stock count or a “currently open” notice can prevent the page from being cached, or force it to be rebuilt often.
- Count the queries. A diagnostic plugin such as Query Monitor, used briefly, shows how many database queries the home page runs compared with an inner page. A large gap points at the “latest” sections or at a widget doing heavy lookups.
- Look for outside calls during the build. Some feed and review plugins contact their provider’s server while the page is being built, so the visitor waits for that server before receiving anything.
When the homepage loads slowly in the browser
A quick server answer followed by a long wait for everything else means the browser has too much to fetch and run. Sort the Network panel by size and by time, and look at which items belong to which section. Then deal with the heaviest first:
- Replace a slider with one strong, properly sized image and a clear headline.
- Make sure the hero image is resized for its space and compressed, and that it is not set to lazy-load, since it is the first thing visitors see.
- Load videos only when someone clicks play, using a preview image in the meantime.
- Swap live social feeds for a few static images linked to your profile.
- Cut the number of “latest” sections and the number of items in each.
- Remove animations that do not help a visitor understand or act.
Because the hero is usually the largest element in view, improving it usually has the biggest effect on how fast the page feels. The technical side of that, finding the element and the delays before it appears, is covered in how to improve Largest Contentful Paint.
Decide what the home page is for
Most of the slowness on home pages comes from trying to show everything. Before cutting sections, it helps to answer a plainer question: what should a new visitor do after landing here? Call you, book, browse the shop, read about a service? Every section should help with that, or it should earn its place some other way.
Sections that tend to survive this test: a clear headline and one image, a short list of what you offer, a few pieces of proof, and an obvious next step. Sections that often do not: a second slider further down, a full Instagram grid, an embedded map when the address and a link would do, and a news section that has not been updated in a year.
A lighter home page is usually also a clearer one.
If the comparison shows that inner pages are slow too, the problem is not the home page, and the triage in working out why the whole site is slow is the better route.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my home page slow even though caching is switched on?
Caching speeds up the server’s answer, but it does not shrink what the browser then downloads. A cached home page that carries a slider, videos and social feeds still has to load all of them. Also check the home page is actually being served from the cache, as some setups exclude it.
Does showing my latest blog posts on the home page slow it down?
A short list of a few recent posts usually costs little, especially if the page is cached. It becomes a problem when there are many items with large images, several such sections, or plugins that run heavy queries for each one. Keep the list short and use small thumbnails.
Why does PageSpeed give my home page a lower score than other pages?
The home page usually carries more images, scripts and outside services than any other page, so it has more to load and run. A large hero image or slider can also delay the main content. Compare the reports for both pages to see which items appear only on the home page.
Is it worth keeping a video on the home page?
Only if it clearly helps visitors understand what you do. If you keep it, show a preview image and load the video when someone presses play, rather than loading the player straight away. Autoplaying background video is the heaviest option and rarely adds enough to justify the cost on phones.
Deciding what the home page is for is your call. Making whatever stays load quickly is the technical part, and that is what our speed optimisation service handles: image optimisation, lazy loading, script cleanup and caching, followed by a re-test and a before-and-after comparison.
Next in this series: Website Slow After Migration? What Didn’t Move With It
