Every slow small business site I have opened in the last year has been slow for one of four reasons. Not subtle ones — the same four, over and over.
1. The page builder
A page builder ships the CSS and JavaScript for every layout it could produce, not the one you used. That is how a five-page site ends up shipping two megabytes to display a phone number and an opening-hours table.
2. Unoptimised images
A photo straight off a phone is four thousand pixels wide and three megabytes. Displayed in a card six hundred pixels across, you have downloaded roughly forty times more image than you needed.
Modern formats and correctly sized variants usually cut image weight by 80% without any visible difference.
3. Fonts that block rendering
Custom fonts are worth having. Custom fonts loaded from a third-party domain,
without font-display: swap, on a render-blocking stylesheet, are worth
nothing at all — the visitor stares at a blank page while they download.
4. Third-party scripts
Chat widgets, tracking pixels, heat maps, review embeds. Each one is a network request to a domain you do not control, running code you cannot audit, on the main thread that is trying to render your page.
Audit them annually. Most sites are still loading a script for a tool the business stopped using two years ago.
What it costs
Google has used Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal since 2021, so the cost is both direct and indirect: worse ranking, and worse conversion from the traffic you do get. People leave slow pages. They do not email you to say why.
The order to fix them in
Images first — biggest win, least risk. Then third-party scripts, because removing them is free. Then fonts. The page builder is last, because leaving it usually means rebuilding, and that is a different conversation.
- performance
- core web vitals