The cost of slow
Google found that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load.1 For a small business, that is not a minor technical problem. A slow site means fewer people see you and fewer people call.
Google has used page speed as a ranking signal since 2018,2 and Core Web Vitals are now part of how Google evaluates pages.3 A slow site can rank lower. It also makes visitors less patient once they arrive.
What slows sites down
Most slow sites have the same problems:
Large, uncompressed images
Photos and graphics are usually the biggest files on the page. According to the HTTP Archive, images account for roughly 45% of an average page's total size.4 If whoever built your site uploaded full-resolution photos straight from a camera, each one could be ten times larger than it needs to be.
Too many plugins and add-ons
Every chat widget, social media embed, analytics tracker, and pop-up tool adds weight. Most sites have at least one script that was added years ago and then forgotten.
No caching
When your site is set up correctly, a visitor's browser remembers files it already downloaded. Without caching, every page load starts from scratch, even for people who visited yesterday.
How to check yours
You do not need to be technical to check this. Go to PageSpeed Insights, type in your website address, and hit analyze. Google will score your site from 0 to 100 and flag the biggest issues. Anything under 50 on mobile is probably costing you visitors.
If the score is bad, the fix usually comes down to compressing images, removing unused plugins, and setting up proper caching and hosting. You do not have to fix all of that yourself, but you should know enough to ask whoever manages the site.
The money part
Deloitte found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed increased conversion rates by 8.4% for retail sites and 10.1% for travel sites.5 For e-commerce specifically, Amazon's internal testing famously showed that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales.6
If your site is slow, it is leaking money. The numbers are not subtle.