3 months of lost leads because an agency couldn’t deliver on a project that should have taken a week.

Got a call last week from a financial advisor who’d been working with a “boutique digital marketing agency” since February.

The project was about website speed optimization.

Their site was loading in 6+ seconds and prospects were bouncing before the page rendered.

3 months in, they had these crazy achievements:

Weekly status calls full of “we’re optimizing”

A PageSpeed score that had actually dropped 4 points

And a $14K invoice for “ongoing optimization”

He reached out to me on a Monday and by Thursday, his site loaded in 1.6 seconds on mobile, 0.9 on desktop. Lighthouse scores in the green. Done.

The work wasn’t magic.

Converted images to WebP with proper responsive sizing. Deferred non-critical JavaScript. Killed three abandoned tracking pixels still firing on every load.

Fixed the LCP by preloading the hero image and critical fonts. Inlined critical CSS and lazy loaded the rest to eliminate render-blocking. Set up proper caching headers and configured the CDN that was sitting there doing nothing.

Fixed a layout shift caused by the chat widget loading late. Standard work that should take a week, not a quarter.

He kept asking what we did differently. I answered as honest as I could, we just did the work.

Here’s the part advisors need to hear.

Speed scores aren’t the most important thing on your site.

A 99 Lighthouse score won’t save a homepage with vague positioning, generic copy, or weak proof. I’ve seen 1 sec sites convert worse than 3 sec sites because the messaging was clearer.

But speed is still crucial. Every second of load time costs you mobile visitors.

Prospects researching advisors don’t wait. Google factors it into rankings. AI tools deprioritize slow sites.

Speed is the floor, not the ceiling. Get it solid before you build anything else on top.

What made me angry on this advisor’s behalf wasn’t bad work.

It was 3 months billed for 5 days of work, and a full quarter of lost leads.

If your agency drags out simple work, that’s not “thorough.” That’s the model.

If you’re stuck in that loop, send me a message. That’s exactly what I fix at TeqStrive.