A one-second delay in page load time reduces conversions by 7%. If your website takes more than three seconds to load on mobile, more than half of your visitors will leave before seeing a single word.
For Hertfordshire businesses spending money on Google Ads or local SEO, a slow website is throwing that investment away.
How to check your website speed
Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and enter your website URL. You will get a score from 0-100 and a detailed breakdown of what is slowing your site down.
A score below 70 on mobile is a problem. Most older WordPress sites score 40-60.
The most common speed problems
Unoptimised images — A photograph straight from your camera might be 4MB. The same image optimised for web should be 80-150KB. Large images are the number one cause of slow websites.
Slow hosting — Cheap shared hosting puts your site on a server with hundreds of other websites. When those sites get traffic, yours slows down. Good quality cloud hosting makes a dramatic difference.
Too many plugins — WordPress sites with 20+ plugins are common and often slow. Each plugin adds code that loads on every page visit.
No caching — Without caching, every page visit forces the server to rebuild the page from scratch. Caching stores a ready-made version, delivering pages much faster.
Render-blocking scripts — Some JavaScript and CSS files load before your page content, visibly delaying what users see.
What a speed optimisation project looks like
For most Hertfordshire business websites, a speed optimisation project takes 1-2 days and can improve mobile scores from 40-50 up to 80-90. The process involves image compression, hosting review, caching setup, code minification, and lazy loading.
We offer free website speed audits for Hertfordshire businesses — contact us and we will tell you exactly what score you have and what it would take to improve it.