Why a slow website quietly costs you enquiries

Check yours in five minutes

Open your site on your phone, on mobile data, with wifi switched off. Count how long until you can read the first line and press a button. Then run the address through Google's PageSpeed Insights, which is free, and look at the mobile score rather than the desktop one.

Do not chase a perfect number. Look for the specific warnings it lists, because those are your to-do list.

The usual suspects

Oversized images are the most common cause by far. A photograph straight from a camera can be many megabytes; the screen needs a fraction of that. After images come too many plugins, scripts for chat widgets and trackers that nobody remembers adding, fonts loaded in six weights, and cheap hosting that is simply slow to respond.

• Serve images in modern formats (WebP or AVIF) at the size needed
• Load pictures below the first screen only when they are about to appear
• Remove plugins and scripts you do not use
• Limit fonts to what the design really needs
• Use hosting with a content network in front of it

Speed is also a search factor

Google measures how fast the main content appears, how soon the page responds and whether things jump around while loading. A fast page is not a guarantee of ranking, but a slow one is a handicap, and on phones the difference is easy to feel.

Fast without being plain

People assume a beautiful site must be heavy. It does not have to be. Our own site uses 3D, but it loads the scene only where the browser can handle it, and shows a simple still image otherwise. Good design decisions are mostly about what you leave out or postpone.

Make someone own it

Sites get slower over time as people add things. Check the speed every few months, especially after a new plugin or a big batch of photos. Part of a care plan is exactly this: someone looking at the numbers so you do not have to.