In a famous experiment, Amazon calculated that every 100ms of delay cost it 1% of sales. Your site isn't Amazon, but the same rule applies to you — usually more brutally, because a visitor who doesn't know you yet has far less patience.
The numbers you need to know
- 53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes over 3 seconds. - Each extra second of delay cuts conversions by roughly 7%. - Google officially uses speed and loading experience (Core Web Vitals) as a ranking factor — a slow site ranks lower even with better content.
Measure properly first
Open PageSpeed Insights (free from Google) and enter your URL. Focus on three values: LCP (how fast the largest element appears — should be under 2.5s), INP (how fast the site responds to taps), and CLS (whether elements jump around while loading). And measure on mobile, not desktop — that's where most of your visitors are.
The 6 most common causes of slowness
- Raw uncompressed images: a 5MB photo where 100KB would do — the number one cause by far. - Cheap overcrowded hosting: the server itself is slow no matter how light your site is. - Piled-up plugins and scripts: every WordPress plugin and tracking snippet adds weight. - No caching: the site rebuilds every page from scratch for every visitor. - Fonts and assets served from slow external servers. - Old or careless code: unoptimized database queries that make the page wait.
Fixes in practical order
Start with images (compression + WebP + right dimensions) — usually the biggest win for the least effort. Then enable caching, reconsider hosting if the server itself is slow, and remove unused plugins. Deeper optimizations (code and queries) need a developer — but pay off on every single page.
One final warning sign
If your site was built “cheap and fast” and has been slow since day one, patching may improve 20–30% but won't fix the foundation. Sometimes rebuilding on a clean base is cheaper than years of patches — and we tell clients honestly which path is worth it in their case.
Bottom line
Speed isn't a technical detail — it's your customer's first experience of your brand, a Google ranking factor, and a multiplier on every pound you spend on ads. Run a PageSpeed test now, and if the score hurts, send it to us — we do a free speed audit and tell you exactly what's slowing your site.