A one-second delay in page load cuts conversions by 7%. Here's exactly what makes small business websites slow — and the fixes that move the needle.
Speed is a conversion feature, not a technical vanity metric
Google measures three things (called Core Web Vitals) and uses them to rank you. But more importantly, humans measure them too — with their patience. If your homepage takes longer than 2.5 seconds to become useful, a third of your visitors are already gone before they've read a word.
The four things that make websites slow
- Oversized images. A 4MB hero photo is the number-one killer.
- Too many third-party scripts. Every chat widget, tracker and ad pixel adds weight.
- Cheap hosting. Shared £3/month plans are shared for a reason.
- No caching. Every visit re-fetches the whole page from scratch.
How to actually measure it
Use PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) — it's free, run by Google, and reports real user data if your site has enough traffic. Aim for a mobile score of 85+ and Core Web Vitals in the green.
Don't obsess over 100/100. The gap between 85 and 100 is expensive; the gap between 40 and 85 is where the money is.
The fixes that move the needle
Images
- Serve WebP or AVIF, not JPG or PNG.
- Resize to the largest size actually displayed — never ship a 3000px image into a 600px slot.
- Use `loading="lazy"` on everything below the fold.
- Set explicit width and height to prevent layout shift.
Fonts
- Load one display font and one body font. That's it.
- Use `font-display: swap` so text stays readable while fonts load.
- Self-host or use a preconnect hint for Google Fonts.
Scripts
- Audit every third-party script quarterly. If it isn't earning its weight, remove it.
- Load chat widgets and social embeds on interaction, not on page load.
- Defer analytics until after the page is interactive.
Hosting and delivery
- Use a CDN (Cloudflare's free tier is fine to start).
- Enable HTTP/2 or HTTP/3.
- Turn on Brotli compression.
The 20% that gets 80% of the results
If you only do three things this week:
- Compress and resize every image on your homepage.
- Remove any chat widget, popup or tracker you don't actively use.
- Move to Cloudflare's free plan.
We've had clients go from a 38 mobile PageSpeed score to 91 in a single afternoon doing only these three.
