Site speed is one of those things you never notice when it is good and never forgive when it is bad. Your visitors will not send you an email to say the page was slow - they will just leave, and you will never know they were there. That is what makes it so easy to ignore, and so costly when you do.
What slow actually costs you
People are impatient online. Every extra second a page takes to load, more of them give up and go elsewhere - usually to a competitor whose site loaded first. Slow pages mean fewer enquiries, fewer sales, and a worse impression of your business before anyone has even read a word. Google also factors speed into rankings, so a sluggish site is harder to find in the first place.
Why sites end up slow
Speed problems are rarely mysterious. A handful of culprits cause most of them.
Huge images
The most common offender by far. Photos straight off a phone or camera are far bigger than a web page needs. Properly sized and compressed images alone can transform load times.
Too much code
Page builders and piles of plugins load scripts you never asked for. All that extra weight has to download before the page is usable.
Slow hosting
Cheap, overcrowded hosting adds delay before your page even starts loading. Good hosting and a content delivery network make a real difference.
What fast looks like
A fast site is lean by design: only the code it needs, images optimised for the web, and solid hosting behind it. It is the natural result of building things properly rather than stacking features on a heavy template. My own builds run on clean, hand-written code served through a fast global network, which is a big part of why they load quickly.
How to check yours
You do not have to guess. Run your site through Google's PageSpeed Insights - it is free, and it gives you a score plus specific things to fix. If the score is low and the advice looks like a foreign language, that is usually the point where it makes sense to get help.
Speed is also tied up with whether you get found on Google at all. If your site feels sluggish, a faster build or a performance once-over is exactly the kind of thing I can sort - and it helps your SEO at the same time.