A slow site is not fixed by one line in a meeting: "optimise the images". It needs measurement, a decision, then a second measurement that proves the change worked. Here is a one-week plan, day by day, written for a Kuwaiti business whose customers arrive on 4G or an unstable cafe Wi-Fi. The order matters more than the effort: measure, set a budget, clean the heavy files, compare numbers.
The first mistake is opening your site at the office and calling it fast. Open it under your customer's conditions instead: in Chrome's Network tab, set throttling to Slow 4G and disable the cache.
Then record three numbers for each page:
Test three pages: home, a service or product page, and contact. Keep them in one file: without a baseline you cannot tell improvement from movement.
Images are usually the heaviest part of a page and the easiest to control. Set a budget before you touch a single file: hero image under 150 KB, in-content images under 100 KB, thumbnails under 40 KB. Convert to WebP or AVIF, and make sure the pixel dimensions sit close to the size the image is actually displayed at. A 3000-pixel photo shown in a 600-pixel box is pure waste. Compress, then compare sizes.
Arabic fonts are heavy by nature, so trim hard: two weights maximum, one file per weight, and font-display swap enabled so text is never invisible while the font loads. Host the font on your own server rather than pulling it from a distant third-party service. Then open the script list and remove every plugin you do not actually use: an old slider, a share widget, an analytics tag someone forgot. Every third-party script, from chat window to ad pixel, is paid for by your customer in seconds.
Turn on lazy loading for images and videos below the first screen, and let the hero image load normally since it is the first thing a visitor sees. Set explicit width and height in the markup so elements do not jump while loading. Then scroll it on a real phone and check whether images appear smoothly or leave gaps behind.
Ask your host to enable Brotli or Gzip compression and to set long cache headers for images and static files. If your visitors are all in the Gulf and hosting sits in Europe or the US, every file crosses a long distance before it arrives. Watch server response time: if it is high, the problem is hosting or the database, not your images.
Go back to the same phone, the same throttling, and the same three pages. Build a two-column table: before and after. If total weight dropped clearly and the main element now appears near two and a half seconds, you are on track. If the gain is weak, look at third-party scripts first, because that is usually the box nobody checked. Set a monthly reminder, and remember every new image changes the budget.
The plan does not need a big budget. It needs someone who sticks to the numbers. If you want a team to handle measurement and execution with you, Q8DM has worked in software, design and training in Kuwait since 1998, and you can start at https://q8dm.com.