Why website speed matters more than you think

A slow website doesn’t send you an angry email. Nobody rings to say they gave up waiting. People just leave, quietly, and go to the next business on the list.

That’s why speed is easy to ignore and expensive to get wrong. This guide covers what the research says, how a few seconds add up over a year, and what you can do about it.

What “slow” means

When people talk about speed, they usually mean how long it takes for the main part of a page to appear: the big photo, the headline, the thing you came to see. Google calls this Largest Contentful Paint.

Google’s guidance says this should happen within 2.5 seconds. Over 4 seconds counts as poor.

Plenty of sites miss that. Using real visits recorded by the Chrome browser, the HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac 2024 found that only 59% of mobile pages loaded their main content within 2.5 seconds. On computers it was 74%. Phones do worse, and most time online in the UK is spent on a phone, according to Ofcom.

What the research says

Most big studies of speed come from large companies, because they have the traffic to measure it. The numbers won’t match a local business exactly, but they all point the same way.

Small improvements make a measurable difference. Deloitte studied 37 brand websites in Europe and the US across more than 30 million visits, in research commissioned by Google (report, summary). Making mobile pages just 0.1 seconds faster was linked to:

• 8.4% more sales on shopping sites
• 21.6% more people reaching the enquiry form on sites that collect enquiries, rather than sell online

Fast pages get more enquiries. Portent analysed around 100 million page views across 20 websites in 2022 (study). On the business-to-business sites that collect enquiries, pages that loaded in 1 second turned visitors into enquiries 3 times as often as pages that took 5 seconds. The authors are clear that it’s a small sample, so treat the exact figure with care.

Speed alone can move sales. Vodafone tested two versions of the same page, identical except that one loaded faster. Its main content appeared 31% sooner, and it made 8% more sales (case study).

Every second loses people. Google’s own course on speed cites the BBC finding that it lost an extra 10% of users for every additional second its site took to load (web.dev).

How a few seconds add up over a year

Here’s where it gets expensive. A visitor rarely sees just one page. They might land on your homepage, look at a service, check your reviews, then go to your contact page. Every slow page is another chance to give up.

Let’s work through an example. These are made-up figures to show how it adds up, not a prediction for your business.

Say your website gets 400 visitors a month, and 4% of them get in touch. That’s 16 enquiries a month, or 192 a year.

Now say a typical visitor looks at three pages before getting in touch, and each page is slow enough that 1 in 10 people give up on it. That’s close to what the BBC saw for a single extra second.

• After the first page, 90% are still with you.
• After the second, 81%.
• After the third, 73%.

So more than a quarter of the people who would have got in touch never reach your contact page. Over a year, that’s about 52 fewer enquiries: 140 instead of 192.

If you win one job from every three enquiries, and an average job is worth £500, that’s around 17 lost jobs, or about £8,500 a year. All of it from people who wanted what you sell, found you, and then gave up waiting.

Change the numbers to fit your business. The point holds: a small delay on every page compounds over every visitor, every month.

Does speed affect Google?

A little, but it’s not the main thing. Google says its ranking systems do use measures of page experience, including speed. It also says it “always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par” (Google Search Central).

In plain terms: being fast won’t push a less relevant page to the top. But where several local businesses are equally relevant, a better experience can help. The bigger reason to be fast is what happens after people click. And if it’s the map results you’re after, your Google Business Profile matters far more than speed: see how to show up on Google Maps in Suffolk.

How to check your own speed

Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool tests any page. Type in your address and look at the mobile result first.

• 90 or above is good.
• 50 to 89 needs work.
• Below 50 is poor.

These bands come from Google’s own explanation of the tool. If your site has enough visitors, the tool also shows how fast it was for real people over the last month, which is the most useful number of all.

Then do the simplest test: open your website on your own phone, on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi, somewhere the signal isn’t great. That’s how plenty of your customers will see it.

What usually slows a small business website

You don’t need to understand the technical detail, but it helps to know the usual suspects:

• Huge photos. A picture straight from a phone or camera can be many times bigger than it needs to be. This is the most common cause, and the easiest to fix.
• Too many add-ons. Chat pop-ups, social media feeds, booking widgets and tracking tools each add something to load.
• Sliders and background videos. They look impressive in a meeting and often slow the page for everyone.
• Cheap or crowded hosting. The computer your site lives on can be slow before the page even starts loading.
• An old site that’s never been tidied up. Years of changes leave a lot of clutter behind the scenes.

Most of these can be fixed without a new website. Shrinking photos alone can make a big difference.

Find out how fast your site is

The free website health check includes Google’s speed scores for your site, explained in plain English alongside what else might be putting people off. If it’s slow and you’d like it fixed, get in touch and we’ll tell you what’s involved first.