Most visitors decide within a few seconds whether to stay on a page. If it is still loading on their phone, many simply go back to the search results — often straight to a competitor.
The usual causes
- Oversized images. A photo straight from a camera can be many times larger than it needs to be.
- Too many plugins and scripts. Every slider, chat widget and tracking tag adds weight.
- Cheap or overloaded hosting. A slow server makes every page slow, however well it is built.
- No caching. The server rebuilds the same page for every visitor.
Fixes that make the biggest difference
- Resize and compress images, and load them only when they scroll into view.
- Remove plugins and scripts you no longer use.
- Turn on page caching and serve files through a CDN.
- Move to hosting that matches your traffic.
Measure before and after
Free tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights show how your site performs on a real mobile connection and what is slowing it down. Check your most important pages — usually the home page, service pages and contact page — rather than chasing a perfect score everywhere.
