How fast should your website load, and how to fix a slow one
Site speed isn't a nerdy detail, it's a business issue. People leave slow sites before they've seen a thing, and Google factors speed into ranking. Here's the target you should aim for and what usually drags a site down.
The number to aim for
Under two to three seconds to load, ideally faster, and especially on mobile. Studies consistently show that every extra second of load time loses a chunk of visitors. A site that takes five or six seconds on a phone is quietly bleeding customers who never even see your offer.
Why mobile is the real test
Most local and small-business traffic is on phones, often on patchy connections, standing outside or on the move. A site that's snappy on your office wifi can be painfully slow on a mid-range phone on mobile data. That phone experience is the one that counts, because that's where your customers actually are.
The usual culprits
Slow sites are usually slow for predictable reasons: huge, uncompressed images; bloated templates loaded with features you don't use; too many plugins and third-party scripts; and cheap, overloaded hosting. Any one of these hurts; together they add up to a site that crawls.
The quick wins
Compress and correctly size your images, that alone fixes a lot. Cut plugins and scripts you don't need. Make sure images load only as they're scrolled to. And host somewhere fast. Most slow sites can be meaningfully sped up without a full rebuild, just by tidying these up.
When it needs a rebuild
Sometimes the problem is the foundation: a heavy template or a platform that's just slow. If your site is fighting its own bloat, a clean custom rebuild is often faster and cheaper in the long run than endlessly patching it. A lean site built right is fast by default.
How I build for speed
Every site I build is made to be lightweight and fast from the start, clean code, optimised images, no unnecessary weight. If your current site feels sluggish, send me the link and I'll tell you whether it's a quick fix or a foundation problem.