Load your own website on your phone, on mobile data, outside your office wifi. Count the seconds before you can read it. If you got past three, more than half the people who tried just gave up, because Google's research puts mobile abandonment at 53% beyond the three-second mark, and every additional second strips roughly 7% off conversions.[1] Speed is a revenue setting, and yours is probably set wrong.
SECTION 01What slow actually costs you
Run the numbers on a typical trades site getting 500 mobile visits a month. At a 5-second load, the three-second abandoners cost you around 265 visits before your page even renders. If 5% of visitors normally enquire and an average job is worth $800, that single setting costs five figures a year. The maths gets worse for ecommerce and worse again for paid traffic, where you pay for the click and the site throws it away.
SECTION 02Diagnose it in five minutes, free
Open pagespeed.web.dev, enter your homepage, and read two things. Field Data at the top shows what real visitors experienced over 28 days, with the key metric LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) needing to sit under 2.5 seconds. The Opportunities section below names your specific problems in order of wasted time. Match each one to the fixes below. Test your top service page too, since customers land there from search more often than the homepage.
SECTION 03Fixes 1-3: images (the usual culprit)
SECTION 04Fixes 4-6: hosting, caching, CDN
SECTION 05Fixes 7-9: builders, plugins and scripts
SECTION 06Fixes 10-12: fonts, redirects, layout shift
SECTION 07What order to do it in
Work your PageSpeed Opportunities list top-down; it already ranks by seconds saved. For most local sites the winning order runs images, hosting, caching, then plugin surgery, and those four typically recover 80% of the available speed. Retest after each change so you know what moved the needle, and screenshot the before scores. Watching red turn green is half the motivation to finish the list.
COMMON QUESTIONSFrequently asked
How fast should my website load?
Under 2.5 seconds for the main content, which matches Google's Largest Contentful Paint threshold for a good score. Under 2 seconds is the practical target for a local business site, and modern custom-built sites achieve well under 1 second.
Why is my WordPress site so slow?
Usually the stack, on cheap shared hosting, running a heavy theme, a page builder and 20+ plugins each loading their own scripts. Each layer adds weight. Removing unused plugins, compressing images and adding caching recovers most of it without a rebuild.
Does website speed affect Google rankings?
Yes. Core Web Vitals are a confirmed ranking signal, and speed compounds through user behaviour: slow pages get abandoned, abandonment reads as a poor result, and rankings slip. Speed also decides whether visitors who do arrive stay long enough to convert.
How do I test my website speed properly?
Run pagespeed.web.dev and read the top Field Data section, which shows real visitor measurements rather than a one-off lab test. Test your homepage and your most important service page, on mobile first. The Opportunities list below tells you which of the 12 fixes applies.
REFERENCESSources
[1] Google mobile performance research (53% abandonment beyond 3s); Akamai (7% conversion loss per second of delay); Google Core Web Vitals thresholds (LCP under 2.5s).
Want the diagnosis done for you?
Our free audit includes a full speed teardown: what loads, what blocks, what it costs you in leads, and the exact fix list in priority order. Most Albury Wodonga sites we test have three fixes worth 80% of the gain.
Not ready to talk? Run the free AI visibility check instead. Thirty seconds, no call, and it tells you whether ChatGPT and Google’s AI currently name your business.