What a slow site costs you

Speed is not a technical detail you tidy up at the end. Someone tapping your link on a phone gives you about two seconds before the doubt sets in, and doubt means back to the search results. The awkward part is that the people who leave never appear in your numbers as enquiries you missed — they appear as visits that did nothing. So a slow site feels like an inconvenience while it is quietly the most expensive leak you have. And it is almost never one big problem: it is ten small ones adding up.

Where the seconds go

The delay is rarely in the page itself. It is in what has been hung around it: images straight off a camera, a typeface that only starts loading once the text could already have been on screen, and scripts added for a campaign that ended two years ago.

• Images loaded far larger than they are ever displayed
• Typefaces with no fallback, so text waits on a download
• Third-party scripts blocking the page before anything is visible
• Sliders and background video almost nobody watches
• Hosting that takes half a second to send the first byte

Measure it the way your visitor gets it

Test on a phone a few years old, on mobile data, on the page your ads point at — not on your laptop on office wifi with the homepage cached. That gap is bigger than any optimisation you make afterwards, and it decides which one to make first.