I have done EVERYTHING right, and still my Wix site's loading time is SO SLOW

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Last night I went down a 4 hour rabbit hole doing everything under the sun to optimize my page and it still fails on Google PageSpeed for performance. My accessibility and SEO scores are 100%.

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I stripped pretty much everything “fancy.” I killed all animations. I removed every single gradient. I killed my background images. I shrunk every freaking photo on the homepage— not a single image is over 300kb and there’s a literal total of 10 images, a half a dozen svgs. I uninstalled and killed all instances of font overrides in CSS. I’m now using Wix’s MadeFor typefaces, and of those I’m only using two.

Previously I had all my images set to 70% lossy AVIF files and every single one of them was under 500kb. Wix claims to convert images to webp, but I call shenanigans because all the means of inspecting the published site prove that is not the case.

I’ve ran the dang site through half a dozen page speed checkers and they all say the same thing and the biggest issue (ASIDE FROM THE MULTIPLE backend Wix stuff you can’t disable), was the fact that the ONE image above the fold is lazy loading and Wix has no way I can find to disable that.

You can’t even preload images in Wix custom code because literally the f******* img src changes so the image can resize…

I’m at a loss. If ALL of my clients didn’t insist on having Wix sites, I’d never have migrated mine over too, just to only have to maintain one source of sites I manage. AND even so, if I hadn’t just spend almost a month perfecting my site, I’d cut all ties to Wix and flip back over to Framer.

If anyone has any ideas or clever tricks, I’d love to hear em, and I can DM you my website if you’re curious. I can’t even bring myself to “fix” the other pages on my site with the new style I did for the homepage because I know it’s still going to take forever to load any pages.

ALSO… I would LOVE to be able to put all my embellishments BACK because it’s absolutely unacceptable that I can’t even set a freaking background image that is LITERALLY 4kb because somehow that causes a longer load time. FOUR KILOBYTES.

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Additionally, I have set all my CMS datasets to “Fetch After Page Loads” as well.

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Hi, @Matthew_Eric !!

Page loading time is a frequently mentioned issue for Wix sites, and I’ve personally struggled with it in many ways. Optimizing images by converting them to AVIF, minimizing font size (Japanese fonts can be ridiculously large when used as-is), and ensuring videos don’t load all at once are just a few key strategies. It’s essential to cut down wherever possible. However, it seems you’ve already paid attention to most of these points.

That said, one concern might be the fact that you’re testing on a mobile site. Having images alone amounting to 3MB may not be insignificant for mobile users. Additionally, optimizing your SVGs using a tool like SVGOMG could be beneficial.

Although Wix’s default image elements dynamically adjust URLs and resize images, if you suspect performance issues or inconsistencies, creating custom image display elements could be an effective solution. By loading images within custom elements, you gain better control over how they are rendered and avoid Wix’s automatic WebP conversion. I learned this trick from someone in the community and used it successfully in the past.

As far as I know, loading images through img tags within custom elements allowed me to maintain the original image format. While this remains unverified today, it’s worth experimenting with.

Also, based on my tests, if you use AVIF images with Wix’s default image elements, they aren’t automatically converted to WebP, possibly because AVIF already provides better performance.

If the cause of the delay on your site remains unclear, experimenting with custom image elements might be a good next step. Another idea is to prepare smaller AVIF images specifically for mobile and use Velo code to load those when the mobile site is accessed.

Of course, before concluding that the content is the culprit, you should first check the performance of a completely blank mobile Wix site on your environment. If the blank site still performs poorly, the issue might not be related to content loading at all. :open_mouth:

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Hi,

I hear your frustration, and it sounds like you’ve already done quite a bit of work to optimize your site. It’s understandable to hit a wall when you’re doing everything right, but still seeing poor performance results. But there are a few things we can try to speed things up even further.

  1. Image Optimization and WebP Conversion
    Wix does automatically convert images to WebP for better compression, but sometimes it doesn’t always kick in perfectly. As a senior developer, I would suggest ensuring all images are manually compressed before upload, using WebP or AVIF formats. You can use tools like TinyPNG, Squoosh.app, or ImageOptim to reduce the file sizes and ensure the best image quality before uploading them to Wix.

  2. Lazy Loading for Key Images
    Unfortunately, Wix’s lazy loading is a bit limiting, and as you’ve discovered, it’s hard to disable for a specific image. As a workaround, you can use Velo by Wix to control when certain images load. Here’s how to manually load images only when needed:
    $w.onReady(function () {
    // Manually load images above the fold after the page loads
    let img = $w(“#image1”); // Replace #image1 with the actual image ID
    img.src = img.srcSet; // Dynamically set the image src to avoid lazy loading delay
    });

  3. Optimizing Fonts
    I noticed that you’ve already made font optimizations, but if you’re still facing issues with performance, font weights can play a significant role. Limit your font styles to the exact weights and variants you’re using throughout the site. Too many variants can create unnecessary page bloat.

  4. Minimizing Render-Blocking Resources
    As Wix automatically handles some aspects of performance, you may still run into render-blocking issues with custom scripts or third-party apps. To mitigate this, defer non-essential JavaScript or CSS by adding defer or async to your script tags:

Additionally, If you don’t want to spend too much time optimizing your site manually, you can try our Website Speedy app for Wix, which offers a 14-day free trial. It automatically handles the optimizations for you.
You can install it here: Website Speedy - load faster | Wix App Market | Wix.com
(Disclaimer: We are the developers of this tool and are happy to assist with any questions you may have!)

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Hey thanks for taking the time to respond, I am just responding to what you mentioned, not trying to be snarky, promise.

  1. Image Optimization
    I reduced my portrait, aka largest LCP (taking a whopping 5s sometimes) to 55kb in AVIF format. That’s tiny, no?
    If so… come on… that’s ridiculous.

  2. Lazy Loading
    Thanks for the tip, I didn’t see that tip anywhere else when I looked. However, “Image” does not support ‘currentSrc’ so I had to tweak it, but it seems to accept this.
    I’ll have to see if this makes any difference and then perhaps I can upload a photo with more than 100 pixels (lol).

$w.onReady(function () {
    // Select the image by its ID
    let img = $w("#imageX53"); // Replace with actual image ID
    
    // Force reload by setting src dynamically
    let currentSrc = img.src; // Get the current src
    img.src = ""; // Temporarily clear the src
    img.src = currentSrc; // Reapply the src to trigger loading
});

  1. As far as fonts go, I am using 2 Wix system fonts now, and no various weights, just the standard bold.
    Would you suggest even disabling the Wix system fonts and perhaps switch to loading/styling font through CSS instead?

  2. How? If I can block any unnecessary scripts/apps, I will.

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I already reduced my portrait, aka largest LCP (taking a whopping 5s sometimes) to 55kb in AVIF format. I shouldn’t have to go that small, and even though I did, it’s still taking 3s or more to load.

I will definitely try the custom image element idea though, I hope that could mitigate some of the issues.

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Love your sense of humor—ha ha!

We are a third-party tool that integrates with various platforms including Wix similar to Google analytics, payment gateways like stripe, or a google font which can be implemented on any website, We take a technologically different approach to optimizing website performance which leads to higher performance. You can explore more about our capabilities on our website: websiteSpeedy.com

We offer our app on Wix app marketplace and several other marketplaces as well. As a team passionate about website optimization, we proactively assist Wix users who face slow performance and are searching for solutions.

There’s no simple “slow” or “fast” switch on Wix. However, our tool optimizes key performance aspects within Wix’s technical framework—enhancing asset loading, script execution, and resource management to significantly improve speed.

If you’re concerned about your site’s performance, I’d be happy to review it and guide you toward the best optimization strategies. Let me know how I can assist you!