Why Google Is Not Indexing Your Site, and How to Actually Fix It
13 August 2026 · 4 min read
Engineering
Why Your Website Is Slow, and What It Is Costing You
Slow sites lose customers before the page finishes loading. Here is how to find the cause in ten minutes.
Opeyemi T. OjurongbeTeam Lead2 min read
Most people in Nigeria will meet your website on a phone, on mobile data, on a signal that comes and goes. If it takes eight seconds to load, most of them never see it at all.
Test it properly first
Do not judge your site on your office wifi on a laptop. Open it on a phone, on mobile data, away from the office. That is the real test, and it takes two minutes.
Then run it through Google PageSpeed Insights and look at one number: Largest Contentful Paint. Under 2.5 seconds is good. Over 4 seconds is losing you money today.
The usual causes, in order
Huge images. By far the most common. Someone uploaded a photo straight from a camera, five megabytes, and the page now carries it on every visit. Resize images to the size they display at and save them as WebP. This alone often halves load time.
Too many fonts. Every font weight is a separate download. Three weights of one font is plenty.
Plugins and trackers. Every chat widget, popup tool and analytics script is more to download and run. Remove the ones nobody looks at.
Cheap hosting. If the server takes two seconds to answer, nothing else you do matters.
Everything built in the browser. If the page arrives empty and JavaScript builds it, the visitor waits and so does Google. Send finished HTML instead.
What slow actually costs
Every extra second of load time loses roughly a fifth of the people who were going to act. If your site brings in twenty enquiries a month and takes five seconds to load, you are not missing a few. You are missing most of them, and they never told you.
Speed is also a Google ranking factor. Slow sites rank lower, get less traffic, and convert less of the traffic they get. It compounds in the wrong direction.
The fastest fixes
- Compress every image. One afternoon, biggest single gain.
- Remove the scripts nobody uses.
- Cut to one font, two or three weights.
- Move to hosting that responds quickly.
- Serve real HTML, not an empty page waiting for JavaScript.
If you want the search side of this too, read why Google is not indexing your site.
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