Half of all visitors abandon a site that takes more than three seconds, and in Costa Rica much of the traffic arrives over mobile data. The five causes behind almost every case, and which one you can fix yourself today.
A slow site is not an aesthetic problem: it is money walking away. A large share of visitors abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to show anything, and in Costa Rica a big chunk of traffic arrives from a phone on mobile data, which is the worst possible scenario for a heavy site.
The good news is that nearly every case comes down to five causes, and two of them you can attack yourself today.
First, measure
Before touching anything, go to Google PageSpeed Insights, paste your address and look at the mobile tab, not the desktop one. Desktop always scores better and it is not what your customer is using.
You will see three metrics Google calls Core Web Vitals: how long the main content takes to appear, how long it takes to respond to the first tap, and how much the layout shifts while loading. That last one is why you tap the wrong button because the page jumped. All three are ranking factors, on top of deciding whether anyone stays.
Cause 1: images
This is the number one cause by a wide margin, and the easiest to fix. The photo straight out of the camera weighs four megabytes and is being displayed in a 600-pixel box. The browser downloads all four megabytes anyway.
What to do: bring every image down to a reasonable width — 1600 pixels covers almost everything — and save it as WebP or AVIF, which weigh considerably less than a JPG at the same quality. A gallery of twenty photos can go from 40 MB to under 3 MB with no visible difference.
Cause 2: too many plugins
If the site runs on WordPress, every active plugin adds code the browser has to download and execute, even if that feature is not used on the page being viewed. A site with thirty plugins is slow by definition.
What to do: go through the list and deactivate what you have not used in months. There are usually two plugins doing the same thing, a page builder left over from the previous version and three form plugins. Deactivate one at a time and check the site after each.
Cause 3: the hosting
If the server takes half a second to start responding, no amount of optimisation saves you: that time is paid before anything begins to load. Very cheap shared hosting packs hundreds of sites onto the same machine and your performance depends on what the neighbours are doing.
It shows up in the server response time metric. If it is consistently above 600 milliseconds, the problem is the hosting plan and no tweak to the site will make up for it.
Cause 4: third-party scripts
Every chat widget, every embedded map, every advertising pixel and every review carousel is one more connection to a server you do not control. They accumulate without anyone keeping count: installed for a campaign, the campaign ends, the script stays.
Take inventory once a year and remove anything not doing a clear job today.
Cause 5: no caching
Without caching, the server builds the page from scratch on every visit even though nothing changed. With caching, it builds it once and serves the copy. It is one of the best effort-to-result changes available, and on WordPress a plugin handles it; on a custom-built site it should come solved out of the box.
What to expect
With optimised images and caching enabled, most small business sites improve noticeably in an afternoon's work. If it is still slow after that, the problem is the hosting or the site's architecture, and that calls for a deeper review.
If you like, we can run the diagnosis on your site and tell you which of the five causes is hitting you, no strings attached.
Want us to review your site or build a new one?
