Why slow costs more than you think
The instinct is to treat speed as a technical nicety — something developers care about and customers do not notice. The opposite is true. Customers do not consciously notice speed at all; they simply leave, and they could not tell you why.
That is what makes it expensive. A slow page does not announce itself in your analytics as "slow page". It shows up as a bounce rate you assume is normal, and enquiries that were never going to happen. You cannot miss what never arrived.
What the number should be
Measure the moment the main content becomes visible, not the moment everything has finished loading. That is the figure that matches what a visitor experiences.
- Under 1 second — the page feels instant. This is achievable for a marketing site and should be the target.
- 1 to 2.5 seconds — good. Most visitors will not perceive a delay.
- 2.5 to 4 seconds — you are losing people, and search engines are noticing.
- Over 4 seconds — a serious commercial problem, and usually a symptom of something structural.
Check it on a phone over mobile data, not on your office broadband on a desktop. That is where most of your visitors are, and it is where a slow site is at its worst.
How to measure yours in two minutes
Open Google PageSpeed Insights, paste your address, and read the mobile score first. Ignore the overall number out of 100 — it is a weighted composite and it moves for reasons that do not matter. Look instead at Largest Contentful Paint, which is the time until the main content appears.
Then do the human test. Open your site on your phone, away from your office wifi, and count. If you have time to think "come on", so does everyone else.
The five things that make sites slow
In roughly the order they cause trouble on small-business sites:
- Images straight from a camera or phone. A 4MB photograph displayed at 600 pixels wide is the single most common cause. Properly sized and in a modern format, the same image is often under 100KB.
- Plugins. Each one adds code to every page, including the pages that do not use it. Twenty plugins is twenty sets of scripts running on your contact page.
- Page builders. Convenient to edit, heavy to load. They generate deeply nested markup and ship a large stylesheet whether or not the page needs it.
- Third-party scripts. Chat widgets, analytics, heatmaps, social embeds, ad pixels. Each one is a request to somebody else’s server, and your page waits for it.
- A database on every visit. Traditional sites rebuild each page from a database every time somebody asks for it. That work is repeated for every visitor, all day.
What fixes it
In order of return on effort: resize and compress your images; remove plugins you are not using; audit third-party scripts and delete the ones nobody reads the output of; and then, if the site is still slow, look at the architecture.
The architectural answer is to stop rebuilding pages on demand. If a page is the same for every visitor — which almost every page on a business site is — it can be built once, in advance, and served as a plain file. There is no database to query and no code to run, so what reaches the visitor is close to the theoretical minimum.
That is how this site is built. Every page you are reading was computed at build time. It is also why the hosting costs almost nothing: serving files is the cheapest thing a server does.
In shortMeasure Largest Contentful Paint on mobile. If it is over 2.5 seconds, start with your images — it is the commonest cause and the cheapest fix.
If the number is bad and the cause turns out to be structural, rebuilding as a static site is what we do — every page computed once, in advance. More about websites →