The three seconds that decide whether anyone reads your site

Most performance work is not exotic. Images, fonts and third-party scripts account for the majority of slow pages we review — here is the order we fix them in.

Weight is the problem, not hosting

Almost every slow site we audit is slow for the same three reasons: uncompressed hero imagery, fonts that block the first paint, and third-party tags nobody has reviewed in two years. Hosting is rarely the bottleneck.

Fix them in that order. Images first, because they are the largest single payload on most marketing pages and the easiest to halve without touching design.

What good looks like

A content page should render meaningful text within a second on a mid-range phone over 4G. Anything slower and you are paying for attention you then throw away.