How a slow website costs you leads (and how to fix it)

Your website is often the first impression a customer has of your business. If it takes too long to load, many visitors never see it at all. They hit the back button and choose the next result.

Why speed matters

Speed affects three things that matter to any business:

• Conversions. Visitors who wait are less likely to fill in a form, book a call, or buy.
• Search rankings. Google uses page experience signals, including Core Web Vitals, as part of how it ranks pages.
• Ad costs. Slow landing pages lower your quality score, which can raise what you pay per click.

How to measure your site's speed

Start with free tools:

1. PageSpeed Insights shows real-world data from Chrome users plus a lab test with specific recommendations.
2. Google Search Console has a Core Web Vitals report that groups your pages by status.
3. Your own phone. Open your site on mobile data, not Wi-Fi. That's how many of your customers see it.

Focus on three Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the main content appears. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while loading. Aim for under 0.1.

The most common causes

• Oversized images. A photo straight from a camera can be ten times larger than it needs to be.
• Too many plugins and scripts. Chat widgets, trackers, sliders, and page builders all add weight.
• Cheap or overloaded hosting. Shared hosting can slow down when other sites on the server get busy.
• Heavy themes. Multi-purpose themes load code for features you never use.
• Web fonts loaded poorly. Several font families and weights, loaded without care, block text from appearing.

Fixes that make the biggest difference

1. Compress and resize images, and serve modern formats like WebP or AVIF.
2. Lazy load images and videos below the fold.
3. Remove what you don't use. Audit plugins and third-party scripts and cut the ones that don't earn their place.
4. Use a CDN so your pages are served from a location close to each visitor.
5. Limit fonts to one or two families and preload the ones you need.

Sometimes a site is slow because of how it was built, and patches only go so far. In that case a rebuild on a modern, lightweight setup can be faster and cheaper than years of fixes.

Want to know where your site stands? Request a free consultation and we'll review your site's speed with you.