There is a number that gets thrown around in every ecommerce talk: most visitors leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. I have never trusted round numbers like that. What I do trust is what we find when we run speed audits on client sites, because the causes are almost always the same handful, in roughly the same order.
Images, nearly every time
A five megabyte hero photo where 150 kilobytes would do. Phones take four-megapixel pictures now, and people upload them straight into the media library without resizing anything. This fix costs nothing but a few minutes: convert to WebP, set proper dimensions, let the CMS generate the thumbnails. Any site where the owner uploads their own photos has this problem. Check there first.
The plugin graveyard
That slider plugin from 2019, the page builder you stopped using two redesigns ago, the social widget that loads four external scripts before your own content renders. WordPress sites collect these like dust. Disable them one by one and watch what actually breaks. My honest experience: not much breaks, and what breaks you usually did not need.
Where the server sits
Run PageSpeed Insights and look at what it calls server response time. If that is your biggest red flag, no amount of image optimization saves you, because the problem is geography. A request from Johannesburg to a server in Virginia crosses the Atlantic twice before your page even starts rendering. South African audience on a South African server is a different class of load time, and most businesses have never tested the difference because they inherited the hosting from a developer.
Fix those three and most sites land under two seconds. None of it is exotic work, and none of it costs much. What it costs is someone actually measuring instead of guessing.
If you want your site measured properly, send us the URL. We will tell you where the seconds are going, even if the answer is that your host is fine and your images are not.