Your website is slow. Here is what it is costing you.

Speed is not an engineering preference. It is the moment a stranger decides whether your business looks competent. They will not tell you they left, and your analytics will record it as a bounce with no explanation attached.

That figure comes from the BBC's own measurement of its site, documented by Google's web.dev team. It is the clearest public number we know of, and it matches what we see in client analytics: the drop-off is not a cliff at some magic threshold, it is a steady leak that gets worse every second you add.

What Core Web Vitals actually measure

Google grades every page on three signals, and all three describe something a human being can feel. Strip away the acronyms and they are simply:

• Did the main thing appear quickly? Largest Contentful Paint. Your headline, your hero image, whatever is biggest on screen. Under 2.5 seconds is good.
• Did the page respond when I touched it? Interaction to Next Paint. You tap a button and something happens. Under 200 milliseconds is good.
• Did the page stay still? Cumulative Layout Shift. Nothing worse than reaching for a link and having an ad load above it and push it out of the way. Under 0.1 is good.

These feed into rankings, but that is the smaller half of the story. The bigger half is that a visitor who waits, then mis-taps, then waits again has already decided something about how you run your business.

The four things making your site slow

1. Images straight off the camera

This is the number one cause on small business sites, and it is not close. A photo from a modern phone is 4 to 8 megabytes. Displayed at 800 pixels wide on a page, it needs to be around 80 kilobytes. Uploading the original means every visitor on mobile data downloads roughly a hundred times more than they need. Serving modern formats such as WebP or AVIF at the right dimensions usually fixes half a site's speed problem in an afternoon.

2. Plugin and script accumulation

Every chat widget, review carousel, popup builder, analytics tag and tracking pixel adds JavaScript that the browser has to fetch and run before your page becomes usable. Individually each one is small. A typical site we audit has fifteen of them, several doing the same job, and at least two left behind by a tool the business stopped using two years ago.

3. Cheap shared hosting

If your server takes 1.5 seconds to send the first byte, nothing anyone does in the browser can recover that time. It is a fixed tax on every page view. Moving to decent hosting is one of the few improvements that costs very little and helps every page at once.

4. Page builders that ship what you did not use

Drag-and-drop builders are genuinely useful, but many load their entire framework on every page regardless of what that page contains. A simple contact page ends up carrying the code for animation libraries, sliders and grid systems it never uses.

What this looked like on a real project

NVX Performance sells insurance-approved vehicle trackers in Greater Manchester and was paying for traffic to a landing page that loaded slowly and buried the enquiry form below a wall of specification detail.

We diagnosed the drop-off point, then rebuilt the page: properly sized images, no unused scripts, the enquiry route visible without scrolling, and a much shorter form. Mobile PageSpeed went from 28 to 97. Conversion went from 4% to 12% in A/B testing, and their cost per lead fell accordingly.

The same ad spend, the same visitors, three times the enquiries. Speed was not the whole fix, but nothing else could work until the page loaded.

Where to start this week

1. 1Test your busiest page on PageSpeed Insights and write down the mobile score.
2. 2Compress and resize every image above 300 kilobytes. This alone often adds 20 points.
3. 3Audit your plugins and tracking scripts. Remove anything you cannot name a reason for.
4. 4Check your server response time. Over 600 milliseconds means the hosting is the problem.
5. 5Re-test. If you are still under 50 on mobile, the build itself is the constraint, not the settings.

If you want an outside read on where your site is leaking, send us the URL on WhatsApp. We will tell you what is slow and whether it is worth fixing or rebuilding, and we will say so plainly if the answer is that your site is fine.