How fast should a small business website be?

As a rule of thumb, the main content of your site should appear in under two and a half seconds on a normal mobile connection. Past four seconds you're losing a meaningful share of visitors before they see anything.

This matters twice over: visitors leave slow sites, and Google uses loading speed as one of the things it measures when deciding what to show.

The usual culprits are simple. Enormous photographs uploaded straight from a phone, a page builder loading a dozen scripts, sliders and video backgrounds nobody watches, and tracking tags added over the years and never removed.

Images are the quickest win. A photo of a finished job doesn't need to be 6MB, properly sized and compressed it can be a fraction of that and look identical.

Test it on your own phone on mobile data, not on the office wifi. That's the experience most of your customers get.

Speed isn't a vanity metric. It's the difference between an enquiry and a back button.