A slow website is one of the quietest ways a business loses customers. Visitors rarely complain about load times — they simply leave, often before your page has finished rendering.
Speed affects three things at once: user experience, search rankings and conversion rate. Google's Core Web Vitals — metrics like Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint — are also used as ranking signals, which means a slow site can be working against you twice over.
The good news is that most speed problems come down to a short list of causes: oversized images, unnecessary scripts, unoptimised hosting, and render-blocking resources. Addressing even two or three of these can produce a noticeable improvement.
If you're not sure where your website stands, an audit is usually the fastest way to find out. It gives you a prioritised list of fixes rather than a vague sense that 'the site feels slow'.