How fast should your website be?

Out here, a lot of your customers are looking at your website on a phone, on a mountain highway or a busy hotel Wi-Fi, with patchy signal. If your site takes ages to load on that connection, many of them won't wait.

Speed isn't a technical nice-to-have. It's the first impression.

Why speed matters

People leave slow sites. Every extra second of waiting is a chance for someone to hit back and tap the next result, which is often your competitor.

Google pays attention. Google measures how fast real visitors see your page load and uses it as one of its signals. Its own guidance is that the main content should appear within about 2.5 seconds. Fast sites have an edge in search, especially on mobile.

It feels like quality. A site that responds instantly feels trustworthy. One that stutters feels neglected, even if the design is beautiful.

What usually slows a small business site down

In almost every slow site I audit, it's the same few things:

1. Huge images. Photos uploaded straight from a camera or phone, sometimes several megabytes each. This is the number one cause.
2. Too many plugins and scripts. Chat widgets, pop-ups, trackers and sliders, each adding its own code that every visitor has to download.
3. Heavy themes. Templates built to do everything, so they load everything, even what you don't use.
4. Slow hosting. A cheap server far away from your visitors.

How I build fast sites

• Images are resized automatically and served in modern formats like WebP, at the size each screen actually needs.
• Only the code a page needs is sent to it. A contact page doesn't load the code for the photo gallery.
• Pages are served from a global network, close to wherever your visitor is, and cached so repeat visits are instant.
• Third-party scripts earn their place. If a widget slows the site down and nobody uses it, it goes.

Check your own site in two minutes

Go to PageSpeed Insights, paste in your web address and look at the mobile results. Don't worry about every warning. Look at two things:

• Does it say it passes the Core Web Vitals assessment?
• How long until the largest image or heading appears?

If it fails, or that number is well over 2.5 seconds, there's real room to improve, and usually it's the images.

The good news

Speed problems are usually fixable without a full redesign. Compressing images and removing what you don't need can make a big difference in a day or two.

And if you're due for a new site anyway, make speed part of the brief from the start. It's much easier to build fast than to make a slow site fast later. You can read more about how I approach web development.