Visitors judge a site as slow long before a stopwatch would agree. What they notice is how quickly the main content appears and whether the layout jumps around while it loads.
Images are the usual culprit
A photograph exported straight from a camera or a stock site can be several megabytes; the same image resized to the width it actually displays at and saved as WebP is often a twentieth of the size with no visible difference. Set width and height on every image so the browser reserves the space and the page stops shifting as things arrive.
Fonts are the second
Every additional font family and weight is another file to download before text renders. Two families and a handful of weights is plenty for almost any business site.
Third-party scripts are the quietest offender
Chat widgets, analytics, tracking pixels and embedded feeds each add weight and often block rendering. Audit them periodically and remove anything nobody is actually reading.
Key takeaways
- Resize and convert images to WebP before upload
- Always set width and height to prevent layout shift
- Audit third-party scripts and remove unused ones
- Performance
- Core Web Vitals
- Images