Why Your Small Business Site Is Slow (and What It's Costing You)

Google has said it directly: slow sites rank lower and convert worse. For a small business, that math is brutal, you’re paying for ads that send people to a page that loses them before it loads.

The usual suspects

1. Huge, uncompressed images. A 4 MB hero photo is the #1 thing I find.
2. Bloated page builders. Most drag-and-drop tools ship 500 KB of JavaScript before your first word renders.
3. Slow hosting. Shared $3/mo plans can take 1.5 seconds just to respond, before the browser has downloaded a single byte.
4. No caching or CDN. Every visitor hits the origin server fresh, worldwide.

The fixes that move the needle

• Modern image formats (AVIF / WebP) with width-appropriate variants.
• Static-first rendering, serve HTML that’s already built, not generated on every request.
• A real CDN. Cloudflare free tier covers most small businesses.
• Measured budget. Keep the homepage under 300 KB total. Most of mine ship under 80 KB.

The target

• Largest Contentful Paint under 1.5s
• Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms
• Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.05

If your site doesn’t hit those, get in touch, a tune-up is usually a one-week engagement.