Your app isn't slow. One of these five things is.

Slowness feels like a mystery. You open a screen, it takes three seconds, and there's no error message to investigate. Because you can't see it, it turns into folklore: "the server is probably weak", "probably too many people using it".

It almost never is. In AI-generated apps, slowness nearly always comes from the same five places — and the first one accounts for more than half the cases we see.

1. The database is asked the same thing 400 times

You have a list of 200 orders and want each row to show the customer's name. The right way is one question to the database. The way AI writes it is one question per row — 200 round trips instead of one.

With 5 test records, nobody notices. With real data, the screen hangs. This is the runaway champion, and the fix is usually a few hours of work.

2. Enormous photos sent to phones

The image you uploaded is 4 MB. On screen it appears tiny, because the browser shrank it — after downloading all 4 MB over your user's mobile connection. Resizing on the server, using modern formats, and loading on demand routinely cuts page weight by 80%.

3. Nothing is kept

Your home page shows the same highlights all day, but the app recomputes them from scratch on every visit, for every person. Keeping the result for a few minutes (that's caching) turns a heavy query into an instant response.

4. Every page ships the whole app

Someone who only wants the pricing page also downloads the code for the dashboard, the editor, and the settings screens. Splitting that so each screen loads only what it needs is configuration work, not a rewrite — and the first paint gets visibly faster.

5. The server is far from the people using it

If your users are in Brazil and the machine is in Virginia, every request crosses the continent twice. No code optimization beats the speed of light. Changing region, or putting a CDN in front, is the cheapest win available.

The part that matters: measure first

The rule never changes: don't optimize in the dark. First we measure the real app, with real data, and find out where the seconds actually go. Only then do we touch anything. Skip that and you'll spend a week improving something that cost 40 milliseconds.

If your app is slow and you don't know why, we'll measure it, show you the numbers, and tell you what's worth fixing first.