A customer is looking for a plumber on their phone, taps your name and stares at a white screen for three seconds. Then they tap back and pick the next one. You see nothing: no missed call, no complaint, no message. Just a week that is a little quieter than usual.

That is the annoying thing about a slow website. The damage is real, but it leaves no trace. Which is why it is the first thing we look at when someone tells us their website "doesn't bring in much".

How slow is too slow?

A useful rule of thumb: if the page does not show something usable within about two seconds, you are losing visitors. At four seconds a large share of them leave. On a phone with patchy reception, in a shopping street or in a car, those seconds go fast.

You do not have to guess. Google offers a free measurement anyone can use: search for PageSpeed Insights, paste in your address and choose the mobile view. You get a score from 0 to 100 and, more importantly, a list of what weighs the most. Below 50 there is work to do. Between 50 and 80 an afternoon usually gains you a lot. Above 90 you can stop worrying about this.

Where the seconds usually go

In our experience it is almost always the same four things, in this order:

  • Photos that are far too big. A photo straight from a phone is often 4 to 8 megabytes. On a website it rarely needs to be bigger than 200 kilobytes, twenty to forty times smaller. One page with ten such photos takes half a minute on mobile.
  • Too many plug-ins and scripts. A chat button, a cookie banner, two kinds of analytics, an external font, a video player. Each one is small on its own. Together they are most of the waiting time.
  • Cheap hosting shared with many sites. If the server itself thinks for a second before it starts, the rest can be as tidy as you like.
  • No caching. A good site remembers what it has already produced and shows it straight away to the next visitor. Many sites rebuild every page every time.

What you can do yourself, today

For the first two points you do not need a developer.

Shrink the photos. Open the three most visited pages, usually the homepage, the contact page and one services page. Replace the photos there with a version no wider than 1600 pixels, saved as JPEG or WebP. Free tools such as Squoosh do this in the browser. On most sites this alone removes seconds.

Clear out plug-ins. Go down the list and ask of each one: has anyone used this in the past six months? A chat button nobody clicks, a newsletter pop-up for a newsletter you do not send, a second analytics package. Remove them. Take a backup first, or ask whoever manages your site to do so.

Then measure again with the same Google tool. You see immediately what it gained you, and it motivates you to keep going.

When to bring someone in

If the score is still low after the clean-up, the problem is deeper: in the hosting, in the theme or in how the site was built. That is work for whoever maintains the site. Ask them for two specific things: the time until the first content is visible on mobile, and how long the server itself needs before it starts answering. Anyone who knows the site well has an answer and a proposal within a day.

Watch what comes back. "We will optimise" is not an answer. "Photos will be resized automatically, the server gets caching and we remove three scripts; after that we expect a score above 85" is.

What to do this week

  • Measure your site on your phone with PageSpeed Insights and write down the score.
  • Shrink the photos on your three most important pages and remove plug-ins nobody uses.
  • Measure again. If the score is still below 70, ask whoever maintains your site for a concrete plan.

Not sure whether it is the site or the hosting? Feel free to send us the address. We will look at it and tell you honestly what we see, even if the answer is that you do not need to do anything.