Why website speed quietly costs you customers
A site that takes four seconds to load loses roughly a quarter of its visitors before they see anything. Here's what actually slows sites down.
Speed is the one thing every visitor notices and nobody compliments. When a page loads instantly people simply carry on reading; when it stalls they leave, and you never find out they were there.
In practice, the biggest culprits are almost always the same three things: oversized images uploaded straight from a phone or camera, a pile of plugins each loading its own scripts, and hosting that's shared with hundreds of other sites.
Fixing the first one is usually the single biggest win. Serving images in a modern format like WebP, at the size they're actually displayed, routinely cuts page weight by more than half without any visible difference in quality.
The second is about discipline. Every plugin you add loads code on every page, whether that page uses the feature or not. Auditing what you genuinely need — and removing what you don't — often recovers a second or more.
None of this is exotic work. It's the groundwork that should be part of building the site in the first place, which is exactly how we approach it.
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