Three seconds, and half your visitors are gone
Google research shows that when loading time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of a visitor leaving rises by 32%. At 5 seconds it is 90%. These are not people who dislike your offer - they are people who never saw it.
How speed affects your business
Sales. For online stores, every 100 milliseconds of delay can measurably cut conversion. On a store doing €10,000 a month, one extra second of loading can quietly cost you hundreds of euros.
Google rankings. Speed is an official ranking factor. Between two similar sites, the faster one wins. Core Web Vitals - the metrics Google measures - are part of the algorithm, not a recommendation.
Advertising cost. If you run Google Ads, a slow landing page raises your cost per click. You literally pay more for the same traffic.
How to measure it properly
Open PageSpeed Insights and enter your address. Look at the mobile score, not desktop - that is where most of your traffic is and where problems show up.
- 90-100 (green) - excellent, you are ahead of most competitors
- 50-89 (orange) - there is work to do, but nothing dramatic
- 0-49 (red) - you are losing clients right now
The most common causes of slowness
- Unoptimised images - a 4 MB photo straight from the camera on the homepage. The most frequent cause, and the easiest to fix.
- Too many plugins - each one loads its own files. Twenty plugins mean hundreds of extra requests.
- Cheap hosting - a €2-a-month server shared with 500 other sites cannot be fast.
- Heavy themes - "multipurpose" templates load code for features you never use.
- No caching - the site rebuilds every page from scratch for every visitor.
What actually works
- Convert images to WebP and resize them properly - often halves the loading time.
- Remove unused plugins - not deactivate, remove.
- Enable caching and, ideally, a CDN.
- For new projects, build on a fast foundation from the start: a static site or a modern framework beats any optimisation applied afterwards.
An honest note
Sometimes optimisation is not worth it. If the website is old, built on a bloated theme with twenty plugins, months of patching cost more than a proper rebuild. We tell clients that directly.
Want to know where your website is losing seconds? Ask for a free audit - you get an answer within 24 hours.