People do not wait. If a page takes more than about three seconds on a phone, a significant share of visitors leave — and they leave before seeing anything, so you never know they were there.
It also affects where you rank. Google measures real load speed for real visitors and uses it as a ranking signal. A slow site is quietly penalised twice.
The usual culprits
Enormous images
This is the number one cause by a distance. A photo straight off a modern phone can be 6MB. Displayed at the size it actually appears on screen, it needs to be perhaps 200KB. Ten of those on a page is 60MB of downloading for something that should have been under 2.
Fixable in an afternoon: resize images to the dimensions they are shown at, compress them, and serve modern formats like WebP. Free tools do this.
Page builders
Drag-and-drop builders make editing easy by generating enormous amounts of markup and loading their whole toolkit on every page, whether the page uses it or not. Convenient to edit, heavy to load. If you rarely change your site, you are paying that cost daily for a convenience you use twice a year.
Plugin sprawl
Every plugin adds code that loads on every page. Sites that have been running a few years often carry a dozen, several forgotten, several doing nothing. Each one is also a security liability.
Cheap shared hosting
The £2-a-month plans put hundreds of sites on one server. When the others are busy, yours is slow, and there is nothing you can do from your end.
How to find out where you stand
Run your site through Google's PageSpeed Insights. It is free, it needs nothing installed, and it tells you your score on mobile and desktop plus exactly what is slowing you down. Test the mobile score — that is what most of your visitors get and it is always the worse number.
Anything under 50 on mobile is genuinely costing you enquiries. Between 50 and 90 is normal and worth improving. Above 90 is good.
What to do about it
- 1.Compress your images first — it is free and usually fixes most of the problem
- 2.Remove plugins you do not use
- 3.Check what your hosting actually costs and what you get for it
- 4.If the site is built on a heavy page builder and is still slow after all that, the honest answer is usually a rebuild rather than more patching
The first two are things you can do yourself this week. Do those before paying anyone for anything.
If you've done the free fixes and it's still slow, send me the link and I'll tell you what's actually wrong — no charge for looking.