Page load time is the number of seconds between someone clicking your link and the page becoming usable in front of them. It is speed measured the way a real visitor feels it: as waiting.
For a small business, this is money. Every extra second of waiting sends some visitors away before they ever see your offer, and the ones who leave rarely come back. Load time is shaped by where your site is hosted, how heavy the images are, and how much code the page has to run before a person can read and use it. It is one of the few site problems a visitor feels in their body, as impatience, so it is worth taking seriously rather than guessing at.
I build lean, fast pages and watch how quickly the main content actually appears, measured by LCP. The reason is straightforward: a visitor cannot read, trust, or act on a page that has not finished loading, so speed comes before everything the page is meant to do. For the full set of levers behind a quick site, see page speed.