Most small business sites carry two megabytes of plugin overhead to render a page of text. Here is how to see it, and what to do about it.
Open your own site on a phone, on mobile data, away from your office wifi. Count the seconds until you can read something. That number is the honest one, and for most small business sites it is somewhere between four and nine.
Every second of it costs conversions. It also costs rankings, because Core Web Vitals are a direct ranking input and a slow site gets crawled less thoroughly.
Where the weight comes from
Almost always: page-builder plugins. Each one loads its own stylesheet and script bundle whether or not the page uses its features. Stack six or seven and a text page ships two megabytes before a single image loads. Then the images arrive, usually uncompressed, at desktop dimensions, on a phone.
You can see this yourself. Open your site, press F12, go to the Network tab and reload. Sort by size. The culprits are usually obvious within ten seconds.
The fixes, in order of return
Compress and correctly size your images, this alone often halves page weight. Remove plugins you are not actively using. Enable caching. Serve modern image formats. Those four steps fix most sites without a rebuild.
If the site is still slow after that, the architecture is the problem rather than the configuration, and no amount of optimisation plugins will save it. That is the point at which rebuilding on a statically rendered stack pays for itself.