Here is a number worth remembering: Google's own research found that more than half of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load (Think with Google, 2017). Phones and networks have improved since, but patience hasn't. They don't complain. They don't come back later. They hit the back button and call the next company on the list.
For a local business that pays for every click, a slow site is a hole in the bucket. You can have the best ad in Hamilton, and if the page behind it takes six seconds on a phone, you are paying to send people to your competitor.
How to check in five minutes
Open Google's PageSpeed Insights (free, no account needed) and paste in your homepage and your most important service page. Look at the mobile score first, because most of your visitors are on a phone. Then do the test the honest way: stand in your parking lot, switch your phone off wifi, and load your own site. Count.
If it is under three seconds and the page is readable right away, you are fine. If you are watching a white screen, or the layout jumps around as things load, keep reading.
The usual causes
Huge images. The most common problem by far. A photo straight from a phone is often 4 or 5 MB. A website needs it at 200 KB. Ten uncompressed photos on a homepage is twenty seconds on a cellular connection. The fix is to resize and compress every image before it goes up, and to make the browser load the ones below the fold only when the visitor scrolls to them.
Too many add-ons. Chat widgets, review widgets, pop-ups, tracking pixels, font libraries, sliders. Each one is a separate download before your page is usable. Keep what earns its place and remove the rest.
Cheap hosting. Some hosts put hundreds of sites on one slow server. If your images are fine and the site is still slow to start, this is usually why.
Old themes and page builders. Many templates ship with code for features you'll never use, and all of it loads on every page.
What good looks like
Text appears almost immediately. The main image appears within a second or two. Nothing jumps. The phone number and the button are tappable before the visitor has finished reading the headline. On a clean build this is not hard to achieve, and it is the standard we hold every site we build to.
Why it matters beyond the visitor
Google uses speed as a ranking factor, especially on mobile. AI assistants that read your pages to decide whether to recommend you prefer pages they can fetch quickly and parse cleanly. And landing page experience is one of the inputs to the Quality Score that Google Ads uses to price your clicks, so a fast, relevant page tends to cost less per click. Speed pays three ways.
Check yours this week. If it fails, fix the images first. That alone solves most of it.