Why is my Lovable website slow?

Slowness is usually caused by large unoptimised images, too much data fetched at once, or heavy client-side rendering — profile it with Lighthouse/DevTools before asking Lovable to fix anything.

How do I speed up a Lovable website?

Compress and lazy-load images, fetch only the data each page needs, remove unused dependencies, and ask Lovable to run a performance/codebase audit to find the highest-impact fixes.

Why does my Lovable app get slower as I add features?

Each new feature can add its own data fetches, dependencies, and re-renders that compound over time — without periodic clean-up, an app accumulates weight even if each individual change seems small.

How do I improve Lighthouse scores?

Run Lighthouse to find your worst-scoring category, fix the top 2-3 flagged issues (usually images, unused JavaScript, or render-blocking resources), and re-run it to confirm before moving on.

How do I improve Core Web Vitals?

Focus on the three metrics Google measures — LCP (loading), INP (interactivity), and CLS (visual stability) — and fix the specific one flagged as poor, usually starting with images for LCP.

How do I improve LCP?

Largest Contentful Paint is almost always slowed by an oversized hero image or a render-blocking resource — compress/preload the largest above-the-fold element and defer everything not needed for first paint.

Why are images loading slowly?

Images usually load slowly because they're uploaded at full camera/design resolution, in an uncompressed format, and without lazy-loading or a CDN — the fix is compression, correct sizing, and modern formats.

Why is my database making so many requests?

Usually a component is re-fetching data on every render, a page is running the same query multiple times, or you're fetching entire tables instead of what's actually needed — ask Lovable to audit data-fetching patterns.

How do I reduce unnecessary database calls?

Fetch only what a page needs, cache results, batch requests, and let Postgres do filtering instead of pulling whole tables into the client.

Why is my dashboard slow?

Dashboards are usually slow because they run several unoptimised queries at once, re-render on every state change, or load large charts and images without lazy loading.

Why does my app become slow with more users?

Slowdowns under load usually mean missing database indexes, no rate limiting, or queries that scale linearly with row count instead of being paginated.

How do I find unnecessary React renders?

Use React DevTools' Profiler and the 'Highlight updates' setting to see which components re-render too often, then fix unstable props, missing memoisation, or state stored too high in the tree.

How do I remove unused code?

Ask Lovable to search for unused components, imports and dependencies, or run a tool like ts-prune/depcheck via the terminal, then remove what's confirmed unused and re-test.

How do I audit a Lovable project's performance?

Combine a browser Network/Performance trace, a React DevTools profile, and a query review of your Supabase schema — then ask Lovable to fix the specific issues found rather than 'optimise everything'.

How do I lazy-load images?

Q: How do I optimise images?

Resize images to their actual display size, compress them, convert to WebP/AVIF where practical, and lazy-load anything below the fold — ask Lovable to apply this across the project, not just one page.

Last checked 31 Aug 2026

Short answer

Ask Lovable to add native lazy-loading to images below the fold while keeping the hero/first-visible image loading eagerly, so visitors aren't downloading offscreen images before they're needed.

What lazy-loading does

Lazy-loading defers downloading an image until it's about to scroll into view, instead of loading every image on the page immediately. It reduces initial page weight and speeds up load for what's actually visible.

What to lazy-load, and what not to

Lazy-load: images further down a long page — galleries, blog post images, footer content, secondary product photos.
Don't lazy-load: the first visible hero image or anything above the fold — that's usually the LCP element, and lazy-loading it works against Core Web Vitals rather than for it.

How to ask Lovable

Add lazy-loading to images that appear below the fold across the site, but make sure the main hero image on each page still loads immediately.

Lovable can implement this with the standard HTML loading="lazy" attribute or an equivalent React pattern, depending on how images are rendered in the codebase.

Confirming it worked

Open DevTools → Network tab, reload the page, and check that offscreen images only start downloading as you scroll toward them rather than all at once on load.

What usually goes wrong

Lazy-loading everything indiscriminately, including the hero image, which then delays the metric (LCP) it was supposed to help.
Assuming lazy-loading alone fixes slow images — a lazy-loaded but still uncompressed 5MB image is still slow once it loads. Combine lazy-loading with compression and correct sizing.
Images loaded via CSS background-image don't support native lazy-loading the same way — these need a different approach (e.g. loading them via JavaScript on scroll), so flag these separately when asking Lovable.

See /questions/how-do-i-optimise-images for the full image checklist.

Sources

Understanding Core Web Vitals

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GuideHow to Improve Lovable Loading SpeedFind the actual cause of a slow project — images, queries, waterfalls or scripts — before changing anything.