A slow website doesn't send you an invoice, so its cost is easy to ignore. But every time someone taps your link on a phone, watches a blank screen for a few seconds and hits back, you've lost a customer you already paid to attract — through ads, SEO or your reputation.
Why speed matters more than ever
- People leave. Google's own research has repeatedly shown that the probability of a mobile visitor leaving rises sharply as load time grows from one to several seconds.
- Google measures it. Page experience signals, including Core Web Vitals, are part of how Google evaluates pages.
- Ads cost more. Slow landing pages hurt your ad experience and waste the clicks you pay for.
- It shapes perception. A sluggish site makes a business feel outdated, even if the work is excellent.
What Core Web Vitals actually measure
Core Web Vitals are three measurements Google uses to judge real user experience:
- 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 layout jumps around while loading. Aim for under 0.1.
You can check your site for free with Google PageSpeed Insights. Look at the mobile results — that's where most local customers are.
Why most small business sites are slow
- Heavy page builders that load large amounts of code on every page, whether it's needed or not.
- Too many plugins, each adding its own scripts and styles.
- Huge, unoptimised images uploaded straight from a camera or phone.
- Cheap shared hosting far from the visitors.
- Chat widgets, trackers and embeds all loading before the content.
How we build fast sites
We build on Next.js and pre-render pages, so the server doesn't assemble anything when a visitor arrives — the finished page is already waiting on a global network close to them. Images are automatically resized and served in modern formats like AVIF and WebP. Fonts are self-hosted. Scripts load only when they're needed.
“The fastest code is the code you never send. Every script on a page has to earn its place.”
Quick wins you can do today
- Compress and resize images before uploading — rarely does a website image need to be wider than 2,000 pixels.
- Remove plugins and widgets you don't actively use.
- Test your homepage and your most important service page in PageSpeed Insights, on mobile.
- Make sure your hosting has servers near your customers and uses HTTP/2 or HTTP/3.
Want to know how your site performs? Send us the address and we'll send back a short, plain-language speed report.
