Your website was probably signed off on a laptop in an office with good wifi. It gets used on a phone, one bar of signal, parked up on a job.
Those are not the same test, and the second one is the only one that counts.
We inherited a site for an earthworks contractor where the homepage weighed sixty seven megabytes on mobile. Not sixty seven kilobytes. Sixty seven megabytes. On a rural connection outside Te Puke that is not a slow page, it is a blank rectangle. The visitor sees nothing, waits, and leaves. Google Search Console showed almost no clicks, and the obvious conclusion was that nobody was searching. People were searching. They were arriving and leaving before anything rendered.
We rebuilt it at one hundred and eighty six kilobytes. Over sixty days, clicks from Google went from zero to one hundred and seventy five. The average position moved from 39.5 to 16.6. Nothing about the business changed. The same team, the same trucks, the same prices. The page just loaded.
How to check yours in two minutes
Open your site on your phone, on mobile data, not wifi, ideally somewhere with poor coverage. Count out loud. If you get past four before the headline appears, you have a problem worth money.
Then open PageSpeed Insights, put your homepage in, and read the mobile score rather than the desktop one. Desktop scores are flattering and irrelevant.
What makes a page heavy
Almost always images. A photographer sends you a folder of five megabyte photographs and somebody uploads them straight to the site. Twelve of those on a homepage is sixty megabytes before a single line of text loads.
After that it is fonts, sliders, chat widgets, tracking scripts, and page builders that ship code for features you are not using.
What actually fixes it
Compress every image and serve it at the size it displays at. A photo shown at 800 pixels wide does not need to be 4000 pixels wide. Remove the slider. Nobody has ever hired a contractor because of a slider.
Cut the plugins you are not using. Load the tracking you genuinely need and drop the rest.
If the site is built on a page builder that ships two megabytes of JavaScript regardless, no amount of trimming fixes it and you are better off rebuilding. That is what our website builds are for.
The part most people miss
Fast is not a nice-to-have that sits alongside good content and good rankings. It comes first. A page nobody sees cannot rank, cannot convert, and cannot be judged on its copy.
If your site loses the visitor in the first four seconds, everything else you do to it is decoration.