Your website might get visits from a mountain train via a VPN. And it should still load

Paradoxically, our computers, phones, and every device we use to go online get more powerful year after year, yet the internet continues to lag. Everywhere you look, ordinary static websites take 2–3 seconds to load, even on 5G. The amount of data they consume runs into double-digit megabytes. The actual payload of an average site consists merely of a few pages of text and a couple of dozen photos, and yet it loads as if downloading all four volumes of War and Peace five times over (and that’s no figure of speech: the four volumes altogether are just over 4 MB). Clients of web agencies often don’t realise how important it is to invest time and money into ensuring the site they order is lightweight and takes the shortest possible time to load. Worse still, web agencies themselves often don’t realise it either. “People are used to the internet being slow, ” a hotel director I know told me recently while we were discussing their website. “Three seconds is a normal wait for them. Of course