A slow website costs you visitors before they've read a word. People leave pages that take more than a few seconds to appear, and search engines notice. The good news is that most of the gains come from a handful of changes.
1. Images
Images are nearly always the biggest problem. A photo straight off a phone can be several megabytes when it only needs to be a couple of hundred kilobytes. Resize images to the size they're shown at, serve modern formats like WebP or AVIF, provide retina versions only where they're needed, and lazy load anything below the fold.
2. Scripts
Every tracking tag, chat widget and slider adds weight and work for the browser. Audit what's actually being used and remove the rest. What's left should load after the page content, not before it.
3. Fonts
Custom fonts are lovely but easy to overdo. Stick to the weights you really use, host them yourself, and make sure text is visible while they load rather than flashing in late.
4. Caching and compression
Pages, styles and scripts should be compressed and cached so returning visitors and the next page load almost instantly. This is usually a few lines of server configuration, and it's surprising how often it's missing.
5. Hosting
Cheap shared hosting can undo all of the above. A decent server close to your customers, with a CDN for static files, makes a real difference for very little extra cost.
Measure, don't guess
Tools like PageSpeed Insights and your browser's own developer tools will show exactly where the time goes. Fix the biggest thing first, measure again, and repeat. Speed isn't a one-off job, but once the basics are right it's easy to keep it that way.