Why your site takes eight seconds, and what that costs

Test it the way your customer experiences it, not on the office wifi. The gap between those two numbers is where the jobs go.

Every tradie site we have ever looked at loads fine on a laptop with fibre. That is not the test. The test is a five-year-old Android on mobile data in a driveway.

Check yours in a minute

Open your site on your phone with wifi turned OFF, and count. Anything past three seconds before you can read the headline is costing you people who have another tab open with somebody else's number in it.

What is usually to blame

• Photos straight off the camera. A single 4 MB job photo is bigger than an entire well-built site. This is the number one cause, every time.
• A page builder. The drag-and-drop plugin that made the site easy to build ships hundreds of kilobytes of code to every visitor forever.
• Ten plugins doing nothing. Each one loads on every page whether the page uses it or not.
• Fonts from three different services, each one a fresh connection before a single word appears.
• A chat widget nobody has ever answered.

Speed is not a design choice you can add later. It is the sum of decisions made when the site is built, which is why a slow site is usually cheaper to replace than to repair.

What fast actually looks like

This site is the example we can point at: no frameworks, no plugins, no external requests before the page paints, and the fonts served from the same place as everything else. The whole stylesheet is smaller than one unoptimised photo. It is not clever — it is just the result of refusing to add things.

If you want the full list of what to check on your own site, it is here: the ten-point checklist.