Why is my website slow — and what it's costing you
Half the small-business websites we check take more than five seconds to appear on a phone. Most owners have no idea, because their own site loads instantly for them — it's saved on their device from the hundred previous visits. Your customers get the slow version.
What slow actually costs
People give a page about three seconds. After that they press back and tap the next result — your competitor. Google measures this too: speed is part of how it decides who ranks, so a slow site loses twice — the visitors who arrive and leave, and the visitors who never arrive because the site sits lower than it should.
The three usual culprits
- Enormous photos. The number one cause by miles. A photo straight off a phone camera can be twenty times bigger than it needs to be, and page builders rarely shrink them properly. Ten of those on a homepage and you're asking a visitor's phone to download the equivalent of a short video before it shows anything.
- Website-builder bloat. Template platforms load code for every feature the template could use — sliders, pop-ups, animations — whether your site uses them or not. You pay the loading cost of features you don't have.
- Cheap hosting far away. Some budget hosts respond slowly or serve your site from another continent. Every page view starts with that delay before anything else happens.
How to check yours, free, right now
Open your website on your phone using mobile data (not your wi-fi), ideally in a private browsing window so nothing is saved. Count the seconds until you could actually read it. More than three? You're losing people. Our free website check measures it properly — the same 100-point audit we score our own builds with — and tells you honestly whether it's fixable or whether the platform itself is the problem.
Why our sites load in about a second
Every MyDiro build is hand-coded — no template bloat, images properly sized, fast hosting — and has to pass our published speed check before launch. It isn't magic; it's just doing the unglamorous work the template platforms skip. If your current site is slow because of the platform it's built on, moving it is a solved problem too.
Related: what a website really costs in Stoke-on-Trent and what moving off Wix actually involves.