A slow site loses visitors before they have seen what you sell. Not because people are impatient, but because there is always another tab. And since Google counts speed, it costs you twice: first visitors, then positions.
What "slow" actually means
Google measures three things, the Core Web Vitals:
- LCP — how long until the biggest thing on your screen is there. Usually your headline or your main photo.
- INP — how quickly the page responds when you touch something.
- CLS — whether the page jumps around under your finger while it loads. That is why you hit the wrong button.
You can measure them yourself: open your site in Chrome, F12, Lighthouse tab, mobile. A minute, and free.
Why sites are slow
Almost never the photos alone. Usually layers nobody notices any more:
- A theme that can do everything. You use a tenth of it; your visitor loads all of it.
- Plugins keeping up with each other. A form plugin, a cache plugin to compensate, and a plugin to manage the cache plugin.
- Trackers. Every pixel is another connection to a server that is not yours, often before your own text is visible.
- Fonts. Four weights of two families, all loaded before a single word is on screen.
- Sliders and video above the fold. The heaviest element gets first place in the queue.
What is different here
Every page of this site is built ahead of time into plain HTML. The framework's JavaScript is stripped out after the build; what is left is one small script for the motion. There are no trackers, so there is no cookie banner either.
The result is measurable, and you do not have to take my word for it: run Lighthouse on this page. That is exactly why I build this way — a studio selling speed has to show it.
What you can do today without a new site
- Shrink your photos. A 4000-pixel-wide photo in an 800-pixel slot is twenty-five times more data than needed.
- Count your trackers. How many are there, and what do you do with the data? If the answer is "nothing", remove them.
- Cross off plugins. Everything you installed last year and never opened.
- Replace the video above the fold with an image and a play button.
Those are the cheap metres. If the site is still slow afterwards, the problem is in the foundation, and rebuilding is cheaper than patching forever.
How I build is on the websites page. And if you are wondering why your site is not in Google: that is a different check.