Nobody has ever asked us to make their website slower, but plenty of people decline to make it faster. It gets classified as polish — something to do after the important work. It is not polish.
The drop-off curve
Visitor patience falls off a cliff between one and three seconds. A site that takes four seconds to become useful has already lost a meaningful share of the people who clicked, and they are disproportionately the mobile visitors on ordinary connections — which, for most businesses in this region, is nearly everyone.
You paid to acquire that click. If the page loses them before it renders, you paid for nothing.
Where the time actually goes
- Oversized, uncompressed images — usually the single biggest offender
- Page-builder themes shipping code for features the site does not use
- Cheap shared hosting with a slow time to first byte
- Twelve third-party scripts, half of them from a campaign that ended a year ago
What good looks like
Largest contentful paint under 1.8 seconds, interaction latency under 200 milliseconds, and no layout shifting under the reader's thumb. These are achievable on ordinary budgets — they are mostly a matter of not doing the wrong things, rather than doing expensive right ones.
Run the free health check if you want to know where you stand. It takes about ten seconds and tells you which of the four causes above applies to you.