Why your website is slow, and what it costs you
The four things that make small business websites slow, in the order they usually matter, and how to check which one is yours.
Slow websites lose customers before anyone reads a word. Not dramatically — people do not sit watching a loading bar and get angry. They just glance at a blank screen, go back, and tap the next result. You never find out it happened.
Here is what actually causes it, roughly in order of how often it is the culprit.
1. Images that are far too big
This is the cause most of the time, and it is the easiest to fix.
A photo straight from a phone is several thousand pixels wide and several megabytes. Displayed in a box 800 pixels across, every one of those extra pixels is downloaded and thrown away — on someone's mobile data, on a train.
Six such photos on a homepage is tens of megabytes for a page that should weigh under one.
What to do: resize images to roughly the size they are displayed at, save them in a modern format, and let the browser pick the right size for the screen. If your site is on a builder this often happens automatically. If someone built it for you, it should have been done and frequently was not.
2. Too much running before anything appears
Every script has to be fetched and executed before the browser can finish drawing the page. Chat widgets, analytics, tracking pixels, cookie banners, social feeds, font loaders, a slider library — each is small on its own, and collectively they are the reason a simple page takes six seconds.
The cookie banner deserves a special mention. It is a script that blocks the page in order to ask permission to run other scripts. Using analytics that does not require consent removes the banner, the script, and the layout jump it causes.
What to do: list every third-party thing on your site and remove anything you have not looked at in six months. Most sites are carrying at least one tool nobody has opened since it was installed.
3. Cheap hosting
Shared hosting at a few dollars a month means your site sits on a machine with hundreds of others. When one of them has a busy morning, your site is slow, and there is nothing you can do about it.
This shows up as a slow first response — the delay before anything at all happens, while the browser waits for the server. If your page is quick once it starts but takes ages to start, this is usually why.
What to do: this is the one thing you cannot fix from your end. It is a hosting decision.
4. A theme carrying features you do not use
Common on WordPress. A multipurpose theme built to satisfy every possible buyer loads the code for a shop, a booking system, an events calendar and a portfolio slider on a site that is none of those things.
What to do: it usually means a lighter theme or a rebuild, so weigh it against the first two, which are cheaper.
What it costs you
Two things, and the second is the one people miss.
Visitors who leave. Every additional second between the tap and the content loses some of them. You will never see these people in your analytics in a way that tells you why.
Search rankings. Page speed is one of the signals search engines use. Being slow will not make you invisible, but between you and a competitor who is otherwise equal, it is a thumb on the scale — and the slow site is also the one people bounce off, which feeds back in.
How to check yours in two minutes
Open PageSpeed Insights and put your address in. It is free, it is Google's own tool, and it tests both mobile and desktop.
Read the mobile score, not the desktop one. Desktop numbers flatter and your customers are on phones.
Ignore the exact number and read the list underneath. It names the specific files causing problems, and "properly size images" appearing at the top confirms cause number one.
Then test it yourself on a phone, on mobile data, away from your wifi. That is the experience your customers actually have, and it is nothing like loading your own site on your own laptop.
What good looks like
For reference, the site you are reading is a static site with no third-party scripts, no cookie banner and images sized properly. Every page loads its main content in well under a second in testing, and nothing shifts around while it loads.
That is not a hard target. It is what you get by not doing the four things above — which is why our monthly fee includes keeping it that way rather than treating speed as an upgrade.