53% of mobile users abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Google data, 2018. In 2025 the patience threshold is even lower.
How many seconds does your site take to load? If you don't know, that's already the first problem.
How much 1 second of load time is worth
Amazon calculated that every 100 milliseconds of slowdown costs 1% of sales. For an e-commerce doing a million euros, 100 ms is worth 10,000 euros a year.
You don't have a million-euro e-commerce. The principle works the same way.
If your site loads in 5 seconds instead of 1, you're probably losing half your visitors before they see what you do. For a physiotherapist with 100 visits a month, losing 50% means losing 50 potential patients. If even just 5% would have booked, that's 2 to 3 bookings a month lost because of speed.
Why slow sites end up this way
The number one cause is WordPress with too many plugins. WordPress itself isn't slow, but every plugin adds code loaded on every page. I've seen sites with 40 to 50 active plugins that took 8 to 10 seconds.
The second cause is cheap hosting. Plans at 3 to 5 euros a month put dozens of sites on the same server. When the server is under load, everyone suffers.
The third cause is images. A photo taken with a modern phone weighs 4 to 8 MB. Uploaded without optimization, every page with 5 photos weighs 30 to 40 MB. On mobile with a normal connection, those MB are felt.
How to measure speed
Go to PageSpeed Insights, enter your site's URL and wait for the result. It gives you a score from 0 to 100 for mobile and desktop, and tells you exactly what needs fixing.
Above 90 you're in good shape. Between 50 and 90 you have room to improve. Below 50 you have a serious problem that probably already shows in your traffic metrics.
Look at the Core Web Vitals: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). These are the parameters Google uses to evaluate the user experience and they directly affect ranking.
How I solved it for my clients
Studio Fisyo had a site that loaded in over 4 seconds on mobile on shared hosting. After migrating to Next.js on optimized hosting, we got down to 0.9 seconds. The mobile PageSpeed score went from 48 to 94.
Organic traffic grew by 60% in the following 3 months. Not all thanks to speed: we also worked on SEO. But speed was the main brake.
For Fulgur Service the problem was the images. By optimizing them and using Next.js Image, the average page weight dropped by 80%.
The solution isn't always to redo everything. Sometimes optimizing the images and changing hosting is enough. Sometimes you need a different approach from the start.
If you want to understand why your site is slow and what can concretely be done, write to me.