Fix your images first

On a slow site, images are often the heaviest files on the page.

Fix them in this order: → Resize them to the size they're shown at (no 4000px photo in a 600px box) → Convert to WebP or AVIF → Lazy-load anything below the first screen → Give every image a width and height, so the page doesn't jump → Preload the hero image instead of lazy-loading it

How heavy is your hero image? Check it in your browser's DevTools and tell me the size below.

#WebsiteSpeed #PageSpeed #CoreWebVitals #WebPerformance #WordPress

Good order. I would add one thing from client sites, the hero is usually a 4000px upload used in a 600px box, and resizing it alone often fixes the LCP score. Preloading the hero instead of lazy loading it is the detail most people miss. Checking mine after this.

Your website is slow — and it's costing you customers before they even see your offer.

Google's own data says 53% of mobile visitors leave if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Portent found sites loading in 0–2 seconds convert far better than anything slower, and Akamai's research puts a 1-second delay at roughly 7% fewer conversions. For a small business website, that's not a technical detail — that's lost enquiries every single week.

The good news: most slow sites aren't slow because of hosting. They're slow because of five fixable things.

1. Images that were never resized. A 4MB photo uploaded straight from a camera becomes the whole page weight. Resize to the display size, compress it, and serve WebP — this alone often cuts load time in half.

2. Too many plugins doing the same job. I've opened WordPress sites running 40+ plugins — three slider plugins, two form plugins, four SEO tools. Audit ruthlessly: if a plugin isn't earning its place, remove it. One tool per job.

3. No caching or CDN. Without page caching, every visitor makes your server rebuild the page from scratch. A free Cloudflare setup plus a caching plugin is a 20-minute job that changes everything.

4. Fonts loading like it's 2015. Five font weights from Google Fonts, render-blocking. Use two weights max, font-display: swap, and host locally where you can.

5. JavaScript blocking the page. Chat widgets, tracking scripts, popups — all loading before your content. Defer what's below the fold and load scripts after the page renders.

Check your site against Google's Core Web Vitals: LCP under 2.5 seconds, interaction under 200ms, layout shift under 0.1. If LCP is over 4 seconds, start with images — that's the culprit in most sites I audit.

We've rebuilt and optimised 300+ WordPress and Shopify sites for small businesses in the UK, US and UAE, and the pattern is always the same: the slow sites aren't the cheap-hosting ones, they're the ones nobody ever audited.

Which of these five is slowing your site down right now? Drop a comment — or message me and I'll take a quick look.

Slow websites silently lose leads, so start with a technical SEO audit to identify speed bottlenecks, broken resources, and performance issues before they hurt conversions. Tools like SerpSpur can help uncover website issues and prioritize fixes before visitors leave.