A visitor will usually wait a few seconds and then close the page. On a phone with a weak connection it happens even faster. A slow site loses customers and lowers its search rankings.
How to measure it
The easiest way is Google PageSpeed Insights: enter the address and get a score for phone and desktop. Google looks at three measures known as Core Web Vitals:
- LCP — how quickly the main content of the page appears. A good result is under 2.5 seconds.
- INP — how quickly the site reacts to a tap or click. Good is under 200 milliseconds.
- CLS — whether elements "jump around" while the page loads. Good is under 0.1.
Look at the mobile result first: most visitors come from a phone.
The most common causes
- Heavy images. A 4 MB photo in a card 300 px wide is the most common mistake. Use WebP and the right dimensions.
- Weak hosting. If the server takes over a second to respond, no amount of page optimisation will make the site fast.
- No caching. Without a cache the server builds the page from scratch for every visitor.
- Too many scripts. Chat widgets, plugins, several analytics tags: each one slows the page.
- Too many fonts. Every extra font and weight adds files to download.
- Heavy plugins and themes. Ready-made themes often load far more than the site needs.
What to do first
- Compress and resize the images; this usually gives the biggest gain.
- Turn on caching and compression on the server.
- Remove unused plugins and scripts.
- Give images a set width and height so the page does not jump.
- If all of that is done and the site is still slow, look at the hosting.
Re-check the speed after every site update too: new banners and scripts tend to slow it down again. If your site is slow, we can run a speed audit and tell you what would make the biggest difference.
