Your site is slow and your agency hasn't said a word

Why your agency has not mentioned it

Site speed is awkward for agencies. Telling you the site is slow means admitting the build is the problem - which means doing the work again, for free, or having an uncomfortable conversation about why.

The easier option is to never bring it up. If you do not ask, they do not tell. Most small business owners never ask, because nobody told them they should.

There is also a structural reason. Many agencies build every site on the same template, on the same heavy platform, with the same dozen plugins bolted on. Speed is sacrificed for build time. Your slow site is not a mistake - it is the business model.

How to check if your site is slow

You do not need anyone's help for this. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste in your website address, and wait thirty seconds.

You will get two scores out of 100 - one for mobile, one for desktop. The mobile score is the one that matters, because that is how most people see your site.

• 90-100: fast. Your site is doing its job.
• 50-89: middling. Some visitors will wait, some will leave.
• 0-49: slow. You are losing customers.

Most small business sites built by agencies score somewhere between 20 and 50 on mobile. If yours does, your agency has known for as long as the site has existed.

What makes a small business site slow

For a five-page site about a plumber, a cafe, or a therapist, slowness almost always comes from the same handful of causes:

• Heavy page builders. Drag-and-drop tools that let an agency build quickly tend to dump enormous amounts of code into every page. Your home page might be loading the equivalent of a small novel just to show a phone number.
• Huge images. A photo from a phone is often 4 megabytes. The same photo, properly sized for a website, is 80 kilobytes. Most agency sites serve the original.
• Too many plugins. Plugins are add-ons that bolt extra features onto a site. Each one loads more code. A typical agency build has fifteen to twenty of them running on every page, most of which you do not use.
• Cheap hosting. Your site lives on a computer somewhere that is rented by the month. Cheap hosting means that computer is shared with hundreds of other sites, all competing for the same resources.

None of these are difficult to fix. They are difficult to fix without rebuilding the site, which is why nothing gets fixed.

What a fast site should look like

A small business site - five pages, some photos, a contact form, maybe a map - should load in under two seconds on a phone over a normal 4G connection. It should score above 90 on mobile in PageSpeed Insights.

This is not aspirational. It is what every site of that size should do by default. The only reason most do not is that they have been built on platforms designed to do far more than they need to.

The performance gap between a properly built static site and a typical agency WordPress build is roughly the difference between a bicycle and a skip lorry going to the corner shop.

What to do next

Run the PageSpeed test. Save the result. If your mobile score is below 60, email your agency and ask three things: what the score is, why it is that low, and what they plan to do about it at no extra cost.

If the answer is vague, expensive, or never arrives, the site needs rebuilding by someone who treats speed as a baseline rather than an upsell. SkipTheAgency builds hand-coded sites that load in under two seconds, and a site rebuild starts at £600. After launch, the Maintained plan at £65/month keeps it that way - against the £100-200/month most agencies charge for a slow site they will not fix.