Why your site takes four seconds to load

Most local business sites were built on a page builder, and page builders ship every feature to every visitor whether the page uses them or not.

The three culprits

1. The theme. A typical commercial theme loads its own CSS framework, an icon set, and a slider library before it draws a single word.
2. The plugins. Each one adds its own scripts to every page, including the pages that never use them.
3. The images. Photos uploaded straight from a phone at 4000 pixels wide, scaled down in the browser instead of on the server.

What it costs

If your page takes five seconds instead of one, visitors are 90% more likely to leave before seeing it (Google/SOASTA, 2017). On a four-second page, plenty of the people who clicked your Google listing never see your phone number.

What to do instead

Serve pre-built HTML from a CDN. Compress the images once, at build time. Ship only the JavaScript the page actually uses. On a five-page business site, that is the difference between four seconds and under one.