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.

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 optimise images?

Q: 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.

Q: How do I lazy-load images?

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.

Last checked 31 Aug 2026

Short answer

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.

The core steps

Resize to display size. An image shown at 600px wide doesn't need to be 3000px wide — resize before or during upload.
Compress. Even at the correct dimensions, unoptimised JPEG/PNG files are often 2-5x larger than they need to be.
Use modern formats. WebP (or AVIF) gives similar quality at a smaller file size than JPEG/PNG for most photographic and graphic content.
Lazy-load below-the-fold images. Anything not visible on initial load shouldn't compete for bandwidth with what is.
Don't lazy-load the hero/LCP image — that one should load eagerly since it's what Core Web Vitals measures first.

How to ask Lovable

Review all images used in this project. Resize and compress any that are larger than their display size, convert suitable ones to WebP, and lazy-load images that appear below the fold. Leave the hero image loading eagerly.

Ongoing habit, not one-off

Every time you add a new image (product photo, blog header, team photo), apply the same rules — compression tends to be forgotten for anything added after the initial build.

What usually goes wrong

Converting every image to WebP without checking older browsers/exports still need it in a fallback format for edge cases (rare, but worth a quick check if you support very old browsers).
Compressing so aggressively that quality visibly degrades — aim for the smallest file size that still looks sharp, not the smallest possible file.
Forgetting images used as CSS backgrounds — these are often missed in a component-by-component review.

See /questions/how-do-i-lazy-load-images and /questions/how-do-i-improve-lcp for related fixes.

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.