Why it matters, without the scare tactics
You will read that a one second delay costs seven per cent of conversions. That figure comes from a large ecommerce study and it does not transfer neatly to a plumber in Oldham.
What is true and useful: most local searches happen on a phone, often on mobile data, often while the person is doing something else. If your page is still blank after four seconds, a meaningful share of people go back and tap the next result. They do not think "slow website", they just leave.
Speed is also a genuine ranking signal, though a modest one. It matters most when you and a competitor are otherwise evenly matched.
Test it properly first
Do not judge your site by loading it on your own phone, on your own wifi, having visited it fifty times. It is cached and it will feel fast.
- Go to PageSpeed Insights (Google, free, no signup)
- Enter your address and run it
- Look at the Mobile tab, not Desktop. Desktop scores flatter everyone
- Ignore the overall score for a moment and read the three Core Web Vitals
Those three are what Google measures:
- LCP, how long until the main content appears. Aim under 2.5 seconds
- INP, how quickly the page responds when tapped. Aim under 200 milliseconds
- CLS, how much the layout jumps about while loading. Aim under 0.1
A score in the green is the goal, not a perfect 100. The last fifteen points usually cost more effort than they return, and the score itself is a diagnostic rather than something customers experience.
Culprit one: images, almost always
If your site is slow, this is the reason about eight times in ten. A photo taken on a modern phone is often three to six megabytes. The same image properly prepared for the web is under two hundred kilobytes and looks identical on a screen.
Ten unoptimised photos on a page is thirty megabytes. On mobile data that is not a slow website, it is an unusable one.
What to do
- Resize before uploading. Nothing on a normal page needs to be wider than about 2000 pixels
- Use WebP where you can. Typically 25 to 35 per cent smaller than JPEG at the same quality
- Compress. Free tools like Squoosh or TinyPNG will take most images down by half with no visible difference
- Lazy load anything below the fold, so images further down do not delay what people see first
- Set width and height on every image. This alone fixes most layout shift
Culprit two: scripts you forgot you added
Every tracking pixel, chat widget, review carousel, social feed and pop up builder loads its own code, usually from someone else's server. Each one is a request your visitor waits for.
The common offenders on small business sites:
- Embedded social feeds. Heavy, and they send people away from your site
- Live chat you never answer. Costs speed and looks worse than no chat
- Multiple analytics tools. Two or three left over from different agencies
- Font libraries loading dozens of weights when you use two
- Slider and animation plugins for one carousel nobody scrolls
Open your site, view source, and count the external scripts. Anything you cannot justify, remove. This is the fastest improvement most sites can make and it costs nothing.
Culprit three and four: hosting and fonts
Cheap shared hosting
If your server takes over 600 milliseconds to respond before anything downloads, no amount of image optimisation saves you. PageSpeed reports this as server response time. Decent UK hosting is not expensive and it is the one cost worth not cutting.
Web fonts
Every custom font weight is another file. Loading four weights of two families is eight downloads before your text appears. Use two weights of one family and the difference is invisible to visitors and obvious to the browser.
Also set font-display: swap so text shows immediately in a fallback rather than leaving a blank space while the font arrives.
This site's entire stylesheet is 47KB uncompressed and about 3KB over the wire with compression. There is no framework, no jQuery, no page builder. That is not showing off, it is the point: most slowness is added rather than inherent.
Fix them in this order
- Compress and resize your images. Biggest win, lowest effort, no technical skill required
- Remove scripts you do not use. Free, immediate
- Add width and height to images and lazy load the ones below the fold
- Cut your font weights down to what you actually use
- Check server response time. If it is over 600ms consistently, change host
- Enable caching and compression. Most hosts have a switch for this
- Then, and only then, worry about the last few points of your score
What good looks like
For a normal small business site: under 2.5 seconds to show the main content on a mid range phone on 4G, a total page weight under about 1.5MB, and no visible jumping as it loads. That is achievable without anything clever.
If you are testing your own site and the numbers are poor, send us the address and we will tell you which of the four it is. Related: why a site might not appear on Google at all, and what a small business site actually needs.