A website that loads slowly is often worse than one that's down — at least down is honest. Slowness can live in seven different places, and you can identify which one in about a minute with the right tools.
1. Your own connection
Test another site. If everything is slow, the problem is your Wi-Fi or ISP, not the target site. Run a quick speed test against a fast site to sanity-check your connection.
2. DNS lookup time
Before anything downloads, your device resolves the name. A slow or distant resolver adds 100–1000 ms before the first byte. Our speed tool reports DNS lookup time separately — if it's high, switch to 1.1.1.1.
3. TTFB — the server's thinking time
Time To First Byte measures how long the server takes to start answering. A TTFB above ~500 ms means slow backend code, an overloaded host or a database problem — entirely the site's fault. See the exact TTFB with the speed test tool.
4. Distance & CDN
A site hosted on one continent without a CDN will feel slow from another. You can't fix this — but the site's owners can, and its status page shows whether the slowness is visible from our server too.
5. Heavy pages
Multi-megabyte images, unminified scripts and dozens of trackers make a fast server feel slow. This is why the same connection loads text sites instantly but crawls on media-heavy ones.
6. Your browser & device
Hundreds of tabs, a bloated cache, or aggressive extensions all add latency. Try incognito mode; if the site flies there, an extension or your cache is the culprit.
7. Throttling & rate limits
Sites under attack or heavy load may rate-limit visitors (HTTP 429) — technically "up" but painfully slow. Our checker flags protected or struggling sites instead of pretending everything is fine.
The 60-second diagnosis
Run the domain through the speed test: high DNS time = your resolver; high TTFB = their server; both normal but the page still slow = heavy content or your device. And if the site is slow for everyone, its 24-hour response graph on the status page will show the degradation clearly.