Most business owners I talk to assume their website is fine. It loads when they check it, looks decent, nobody's complained. So why would there be a problem?
Here's what I've noticed after years of working on local business sites: people usually check their own website on their laptop, at home, on fast wifi, right after they've already loaded it once — so it's cached. That's basically the best possible scenario.
Your potential customer? They're on their phone. They found you on Google at 1pm on a Tuesday. They've got three other tabs open and about two seconds of patience before they hit the back button and click the next result.
How slow is too slow?
Google considers anything over 2.5 seconds slow for mobile. Most small business websites I look at load in 4 to 8 seconds. Some are worse. And a one-second delay in page load time reduces conversions by roughly 7% — that's not a tech stat, that's a sales stat.
You can check your own site right now. Search "PageSpeed Insights," paste your URL in, and hit Analyze. It'll give you a score out of 100 for mobile and desktop, plus a list of what's causing the slowdown. If your mobile score is under 50, there's a real problem. Under 70 and you're losing ground to competitors with faster sites.
The usual suspects
After looking at hundreds of local business sites, the same things cause almost every slowdown:
Unoptimized images. Someone uploaded a photo straight from their phone — 4MB, full resolution — and it's been sitting there ever since. The browser downloads that file every time a new visitor loads the page. One hero image like that can eat two or three seconds on mobile.
Too many plugins. This is mostly a WordPress problem. Every plugin adds weight to the page. A site with 25 plugins is basically carrying a backpack full of rocks uphill on every page load. Slider plugins and contact form plugins are some of the worst offenders.
Cheap hosting. A $5/month shared hosting plan usually means your site is on a server with hundreds of other websites. When those sites get busy, yours slows down. There's no dedicated resource — it's all shared, and it shows.
No caching set up properly. Without caching, every visitor forces the server to build your page from scratch — pulling data from the database, assembling the HTML, sending it back. With caching, the server just hands over a pre-built file. Much faster.
What I do differently
The sites I build are static — meaning there's no server software building pages on demand. The page is already built. When someone visits, the server just hands it over. No database, no assembly, nothing to slow it down.
That's one of the main reasons I moved away from WordPress for most clients. Static sites are fundamentally faster because there's simply less happening when someone loads a page. I also optimize every image before it goes live, test mobile performance before handoff, and host on infrastructure that's actually designed for reliability — not the cheapest option on the shelf.
If you want to see what this looks like in practice, the demo sites I've built are a good place to look. A roofing company, a café, a wellness studio, a B&B, a restaurant — none of them are heavy. They all load fast on mobile.
Let's build something faster
Every site I build starts with performance in mind — optimized images, fast hosting, and no unnecessary weight. Use the quote builder to tell me about your business, or send me a message if you'd rather just talk it through.
What if you're not ready for a new site?
Fair enough. Not every site needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Sometimes the fixes are simpler — compressing images, cleaning up plugins, switching hosting. If you run PageSpeed Insights on your site and want a second opinion on what it's telling you, send me the results. I'm happy to take a look and give you an honest read on whether it's worth fixing or whether it's time to start fresh.
No sales pitch. Just a straight answer.