Imagine you ring a tradesperson and the phone rings for a minute. You would try the next name. A slow website does the same thing, quietly, without you ever knowing.
People looking for tradespeople are often in a hurry. If the page takes ages to appear, they press back and click the next result. You never see the lost enquiry.
What makes a website slow
Most slow trade sites suffer from the same few problems:
- Huge photos. A picture straight off a phone camera can be several megabytes. A page full of them takes forever on mobile data.
- Too many plugins. Every add-on slows the site, and many are never used.
- Heavy themes and page builders. Some are bloated with features you do not need.
- Cheap, overloaded hosting. If your site shares a crowded server, it can crawl at busy times.
- Videos and sliders that auto-play. Eye-catching but costly in speed.
What makes a website fast
- Images that are resized and compressed before they go on the site
- A lightweight, well-built design with no unnecessary extras
- Good quality hosting
- Fonts and scripts kept to a minimum
- Caching, so pages load quickly on repeat visits
Speed and Google
Google takes page speed into account, particularly on phones. Slow sites can rank lower, and visitors who bounce straight back sends a bad signal too. So speed helps in two ways: more people stay, and you get seen by more.
How to check yours
Open your site on your phone using mobile data, not wifi. Count how long the main content takes to appear. You can also run it through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool and read the advice it gives.
A quick win: your photos
If you only do one thing, shrink your photos before you upload them. Most phone photos can be reduced a long way with no visible difference on a website.
Speed is not a technical detail. It is the difference between the customer reading your page and the customer ringing someone else.
Built light
We build sites to be light and fast from the start, on quality hosting that we look after. See the offer or get in touch.