Google's data has said it for years: as load time goes from one second to three, the chance of the visitor leaving jumps by about a third. By five seconds, most of your ad spend is paying for people to watch a spinner.
Yet the average small-business site I audit takes four to six seconds on a phone on 4G, which is where your customers actually are — not on your office fibre.
The usual suspects, in order of guilt. Page builders stacking twelve plugins to do what a page of clean code does. A 4MB "hero image" that came straight off a phone camera. Three font families loading from three servers. A chat widget, two analytics tools and a cookie platform all firing before your headline renders. None of these felt like a decision at the time. Together they're the reason the phone shows white for four seconds.
What we do differently: static pages wherever the content allows — no database round-trip, nothing to hack, load times in the hundreds of milliseconds. Images sized to the space they occupy and compressed properly (this site's entire showcase gallery, seventy-odd photos, weighs about 5MB total — one uncompressed hero image on a builder site can weigh more). Fonts self-hosted. Scripts that earn their place or get cut.
Speed isn't a technical vanity metric. It's the first impression, the bounce rate, the Google ranking factor and the ad-spend multiplier, all wearing one number. If your site takes four seconds, you don't have a design problem. You have a leak.