Your agency says a 10-second load time is normal. It is not.

What counts as a slow website

Google has a public benchmark called Core Web Vitals. The main one most people look at is Largest Contentful Paint - how long it takes for the main bit of your page to appear on screen.

Google's thresholds are simple:

• Under 2.5 seconds: good
• 2.5 to 4 seconds: needs improvement
• Over 4 seconds: poor

A site that takes 10 seconds is more than double the threshold for poor. It is not borderline. It is not a matter of opinion. By the only standard that matters - Google's own - it is broken.

Why your agency is calling it normal

There are three reasons an agency tells you a 10-second load time is fine.

First, they built it that way and do not want to admit it. Fixing a slow site means going back through their own work and undoing decisions. That is unpaid time they would rather not spend.

Second, they do not know how to fix it. A lot of agencies stitch sites together from off-the-shelf templates and plugins. When the whole thing is slow, they cannot pull it apart without rebuilding.

Third, they are betting you will not check. Most small business owners do not run speed tests on their own site. The agency is counting on that.

What actually makes a site slow

The usual culprits, in order of how common they are:

• Too many plugins. Plugins are little add-on bits of software bolted onto WordPress sites. Each one loads its own code on every page. Twenty plugins means twenty extra things to load before your visitor sees anything.
• Huge images. A photo straight off a phone can be 5MB. The same photo properly prepared for a website should be under 200KB. Agencies often upload originals without resizing them.
• A cheap hosting plan. Your site lives on a computer somewhere that is rented from a hosting company. The cheapest plans cram thousands of sites onto one slow machine. When the machine is busy, your site crawls.
• Bloated themes. Many WordPress sites use page-builder themes that load enormous amounts of code so the agency can drag-and-drop things around. Your visitor pays for that convenience in load time.
• No caching. Caching means the site remembers what it built last time instead of rebuilding the page from scratch for every visitor. It is a basic optimisation. A surprising number of agency sites do not have it set up.

What a slow site costs you

Google has published the numbers. When a page goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, the chance of a visitor leaving before it loads jumps by 32%. At 5 seconds it is 90%. At 10 seconds, you are losing nearly everyone who clicks.

Google also uses page speed as a ranking signal. A slow site ranks lower in search results, which means fewer people find you in the first place. So you lose visitors twice - once because Google buries you, and again because the few who do click give up waiting.

For a plumber in Leeds or a beautician in Bristol relying on local search, a 10-second site is quietly costing you jobs every week. You will never see the customer who closed the tab. They just go to the next result.

The agency charging you to host this site is being paid to make you less findable.

How to check your own load time

You do not need to take anyone's word for it. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste your website address in, and click Analyse. Google will give you a score out of 100 and tell you exactly what is wrong.

Anything under 50 on mobile is poor. Anything under 30 is alarming. Run the test, save the result, and send it to your agency. Ask them in writing why the score is what it is and what they intend to do about it.

If they say it is normal, you have the evidence to show otherwise. If they say they will fix it, you have a baseline to measure against.

How to fix a slow website

Sometimes a slow site can be tuned up - fewer plugins, smaller images, better hosting, proper caching. A competent developer can usually get a WordPress site from 10 seconds down to 3 or 4 in a day's work.

But if the site is built on a heavy template with twenty plugins, the honest answer is often to rebuild. A clean, hand-coded site of the same size will load in under 2 seconds without any clever tricks, because there is simply less to load.

I rebuild small business sites as static pages - no plugins, no page builder, no database queries on every visit. A site build starts at £600 and the result loads in 1 to 2 seconds on mobile. Ongoing hosting and maintenance is £40/month on the Hosted plan or £65/month on Maintained, with same-day response and actual content changes included. Most agencies charge £150/month for a slow site they will not fix.