The hidden weight on your pages: fonts, scripts and embeds

Chat widgets, video embeds, tracking tags and web fonts are often what really slows a small site. How to find them, and what to keep, delay or remove.

When a site feels slow, the usual suspects are the server and the images. Both matter, and both are well covered elsewhere on this blog. But on a lot of small business sites, the biggest cost is something else: the things that were added one at a time over the years. A video embed on the home page. A booking widget. Three analytics tags. A map. A font family loaded in six weights when the design uses two.

Each one seemed harmless when it was added. Together, they often outweigh everything else on the page, and because they load from other companies' servers, no amount of hosting can make them faster. The good news is that they are usually the cheapest thing to fix.

Step one: see what your page is actually loading

1. 1Open your home page in Chrome, right-click and choose Inspect, then open the Network tab.
2. 2Tick Disable cache and reload the page.
3. 3Sort by the Domain column (right-click a column header to add it). Everything that is not your own domain is a third party.
4. 4Look at the totals at the bottom: the number of requests and the amount transferred. Then add up roughly how much of that came from other domains.

Write the list down. For each third party, you should be able to say what it does and who asked for it. If nobody can, that is your first candidate for removal.

The usual suspects, and what to do with each

Video embeds

A standard video embed loads the full player and its scripts before anyone presses play, which most visitors never do. Replace it with a 'facade': a still image with a play button that only loads the real player when clicked. Many page builders and plugins offer this as a setting called lazy-loading or click-to-load.

Maps

An embedded map is heavy and often sits on every page through the footer. Keep it on the contact page only, or replace it with a static map image that links to directions.

Web fonts

Check how many font files load. Two families in two or three weights each is plenty for most designs. Host the fonts on your own domain rather than fetching them from another service, use the WOFF2 format, and set font-display: swap so text appears immediately in a fallback font instead of staying invisible while the font downloads.

Tracking and marketing tags

Sites collect tags: an analytics tag, an old analytics tag nobody removed, an ad pixel from a campaign that ended, a heatmap tool from a trial. Remove anything you are no longer actively using. Put the rest in a single tag manager so they can be reviewed in one place, and load them after the page content rather than before it.

Chat, booking and review widgets

These earn their place, because they turn visitors into customers. The question is how they load. A well-built widget loads a small launcher first and the rest only when someone opens it. If a widget is pulling in a large amount of script before anyone interacts with it, ask the vendor whether it has a lighter or deferred loading option.

Measure before and after

Run your page through PageSpeed Insights before you change anything and save the result. Make one change at a time, then test again. The scores to watch are the Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint should be under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Third-party scripts tend to hurt the second one most, because they keep the browser busy when the visitor tries to tap something. Our guide to Core Web Vitals for small sites explains each one in plain language.

Then make sure your own share is fast

Once the third parties are under control, what is left is your own server, your own images and your own code. That part is what hosting decides. Every Serverlys plan, from cloud hosting to WordPress hosting, runs on NVMe storage with LiteSpeed caching included, so the pages you control are served quickly and the time you saved on scripts is not lost waiting for the server.

For the rest of the job, see our guides to image optimisation and mobile speed.