A slow website loses you work quietly, and you never see it happen

Speed is the one website problem with no complaints attached. A customer who waits five seconds and gives up does not tell you. They go back to the results and tap the next name.

A separate study commissioned by Google, run by Deloitte Digital across 37 European and American brands and more than 30 million sessions, found that improving mobile site speed by a tenth of a second lifted retail conversions by 8.4%. Worth knowing, with the honest caveat that those were large retail and travel brands, not a two van cleaning firm. The direction is the useful part, not the exact figure.

What actually makes a small business site slow

It is almost never the hosting, whatever anyone tells you. In practice it is one of these four:

• Photographs straight off a phone. A modern phone photo can be six megabytes. Twenty of them on a page is a download, not a web page.
• Too many plugins. Every one adds code to every page, including the ones that do nothing on that page.
• A slider or video at the top. The heaviest possible thing, in the position where speed matters most.
• Fonts and tracking scripts loading before anything is visible. The page is ready, but it waits for a third party before it will show itself.

How to check it properly

1. Test on mobile data, not your wifi. Your home connection flatters the site. Your customer is on a train.
2. Use Google's own PageSpeed Insights. Put your address in and read the mobile tab, not the desktop one. Ignore the overall score, read the list of specific things it names.
3. Check the heaviest page, not the home page. Usually the gallery or the services page with every photo on it.

The fixes, in the order worth doing them

1. Resize the images. Nothing on a website needs to be wider than about 1,600 pixels. This one change usually halves the weight of the page.
2. Serve them in a modern format. WebP instead of JPEG, which is generally a plugin setting rather than a job.
3. Turn on caching. On WordPress a caching plugin such as WP Rocket does most of this without you understanding any of it.
4. Delete the plugins you stopped using. Deactivated is not deleted, and some still load.
5. Lose the slider. One strong photograph outperforms five that nobody waits around to see.

And it compounds. A faster page keeps more of the people who arrive, and search engines take load speed into account when deciding what to show. You are not optimising for a score. You are making sure the person who needed you gets as far as your phone number.