You’ve probably noticed it yourself: you pull up your own website on your phone and it takes a few seconds longer than it should. Maybe you’ve ignored it, told yourself it’s fine, or figured everyone’s site is like that.
It’s not fine, and here’s the part that hurts: most of your customers won’t wait around.
The 3-second rule
Google’s research is consistent: 53% of mobile users will leave a page if it hasn’t loaded in three seconds. Not five seconds. Three. And on a slow mobile connection (which is what a lot of people in Ontario are on when they’re searching for a local business) your site might be taking six, eight, ten seconds.
That’s not a bounce. That’s a lost customer who never saw what you offer, never found your phone number, never booked an appointment.
Why Wix and WordPress sites slow down
Wix and WordPress aren’t inherently bad tools, but they come with built-in weight that adds up fast.
Wix loads a lot of its platform infrastructure on every page: editor tooling, app scripts, font loaders, even when none of it is visible to your visitors. You don’t control most of it.
WordPress is worse in a different way. Most WordPress sites are running a theme (which loads its own scripts), several plugins (each loading their own scripts), and shared hosting that’s slow under load. Every plugin you add is another thing that can slow the page down, and most site owners have no idea which ones are the culprits.
The result is the same either way: a page that could load in under a second ends up taking four or five.
What a slow site actually costs you
Here’s a rough way to think about it. Say your site gets 200 visitors a month, and normally 5% of them get in touch, that’s 10 leads. If your site is slow enough that 30% of visitors leave before it loads, you’re actually only getting 7 leads. That’s 3 leads a month you’re losing to a loading spinner.
Over a year, at even a modest conversion rate, that’s real money.
How to check your site’s speed right now
Google has a free tool called PageSpeed Insights. Paste your URL in and it’ll give you a score from 0 to 100, separately for mobile and desktop. Below 50 on mobile is a problem. Below 70 means visitors are likely feeling it. (Not sure what those numbers mean? Here’s what a Google Lighthouse score actually tells you.)
Or run a free website audit. I’ll check your speed, accessibility, and whether you’re even tracking where your leads come from.
What actually fixes it
The honest answer is that most Wix and WordPress speed problems can’t be fully fixed without changing the underlying platform. You can optimize images, add a caching plugin, switch to faster hosting, and get modest improvement. But you’re still fighting against the platform’s baseline weight.
A custom-built static site, by comparison, sends exactly what the page needs and nothing else. No plugin bloat, no platform overhead. That’s why the sites I build consistently score 95+ on Google’s speed test, not because of tricks, but because there’s nothing extra to slow them down. If your site is slow and you’re tired of it costing you customers, start with a free website audit. I’ll tell you what’s hurting you and whether a rebuild actually makes sense. Sometimes it doesn’t, and I’ll tell you that too.