Why Your Business Website Should Be Fast

Slow sites lose you money. That's the short version.

I've been handed plenty of websites over the years that took five or six seconds to load on a phone, and every one of them was quietly leaking customers the owner never knew about. People don't hang around. If your site makes them wait, they hit back and go to whoever's faster - usually a competitor.

So let's talk about what "fast" actually means and why you should care.

What "fast" actually means

When developers go on about speed, we're usually talking about Core Web Vitals. It sounds technical but it's really just three things Google measures about how your page feels to use:

• LCP - how long until the main content shows up. You want under 2.5 seconds.
• INP - how quickly the page reacts when someone taps or clicks. Under 200ms.
• CLS - how much stuff shifts around as the page loads. Under 0.1.

You've felt all three. That page where the button jumps down just as you go to tap it, so you hit the wrong thing? That's bad CLS, and it drives people mad.

Why it costs you

The numbers are pretty blunt. Roughly speaking, every extra second of load time knocks your conversions down by about 7%.

Put that against a shop turning over £100k a year and you're potentially waving goodbye to several thousand pounds - over a problem that's fixable.

Speed feeds into rankings too. Google's used page experience as a ranking signal for years now, and faster pages get crawled more efficiently into the bargain.

What usually causes the slowdown

In my experience it's almost always one of these:

1. Massive images. Someone's uploaded a 4000px photo straight off a phone and it's being shrunk in the browser. Serve the right size in a modern format (WebP or AVIF) and you'll often halve your load time on its own.
2. Too much JavaScript. Every plugin, slider and tracking script adds weight.
3. A bloated theme or page builder. Convenient to build with, brutal on speed.
4. Cheap, slow hosting. Sometimes the code's fine and the server's the problem.
5. Third-party scripts. Chat widgets and analytics are usually the worst offenders, and they're easy to forget about.

None of this is exotic. It's the same handful of culprits on most sites I look at.

If you're not sure where yours stands, that's exactly what a website audit is for - I'll tell you what's slow, why, and what's worth fixing first.