Five seconds: the mobile speed tax
Every second your site takes to load on a phone is a customer quietly walking away.
Most of your customers will only ever meet you on a phone, on a patchy connection, with little patience. If your site makes them wait, they won't. They'll tap back and choose someone faster.
This is the speed tax: a real, measurable cost paid in lost enquiries by every slow site. And it's heaviest exactly where it hurts — on mobile, where most local searches happen.
The culprits are usually the same: bloated themes, oversized images, and plugins stacked on plugins. The cure is to build lean from the start, mobile-first, with only what the page actually needs.
Speed isn't a vanity metric. It's the difference between a visitor who stays long enough to call and one who never knew you existed.