What Actually Makes a Website Fast
Speed is mostly images, fonts and third-party scripts. Fix those three and you will beat most of your competitors.
People blame hosting for slow websites far more often than hosting deserves it. In practice, three things account for most of the delay a visitor feels: oversized images, blocking web fonts, and third-party scripts loaded before anything useful appears.
Images come first. A photo straight off a phone can be six megabytes; the same photo resized to the width it is actually displayed at and saved as a modern format is often under two hundred kilobytes. Nothing else you do will save that much time for that little effort.
Fonts are next. Every custom font is another file the browser must fetch before it can paint text. Two weights of one family is usually plenty, and loading them so the browser shows fallback text immediately means visitors read your headline while the font is still arriving.
Then there are the scripts: chat widgets, review carousels, analytics, ad pixels, booking embeds. Each one is someone else's code running on your page. Load them after the page has rendered, and be honest about which ones you genuinely use.
Once those three are handled, the remaining wins are smaller: caching, fewer redirects, and keeping animations off the main thread. Worth doing, but they are polish on top of the fundamentals.