Slow websites lose customers quietly
You never see the ones who left. Here's what makes a site slow and what to do.
Speed problems are invisible to the owner. Your site is cached on your machine and you're on good wifi, so it feels fine. The person who left after four seconds on a phone with one bar never appears anywhere in your analytics as a loss.
Why it costs more than it seems
It's worst exactly where it hurts most: mobile, weak signal, someone in a hurry looking for urgent help. That's your highest-intent visitor, and they're the most likely to give up.
If you run ads, you pay for that click whether the page loads or not.
What actually makes sites slow
Almost always images. A photo straight off a phone can be several megabytes; it needs to be a couple of hundred kilobytes. Resize them to the size they actually display and export them properly.
After that: too many plugins and tracking scripts, each loading its own code; sliders and video backgrounds; and fancy fonts loaded before any text appears.
How to check honestly
Use Google's PageSpeed Insights on your own URL and read the mobile score, not desktop. Test on your phone on mobile data, not wifi. Better still, hand your phone to someone and watch them.
What's worth fixing
Compress the images. Remove plugins you don't use. Cut the slider. That's most of it, and none of it requires a rebuild.
The AI angle
Engines fetch pages to answer questions live. A page that's slow or times out doesn't get read, and what doesn't get read doesn't get quoted.
Curious where you stand? Run the free AI visibility check on your own website — it takes about a minute.