Why your site's speed directly affects your sales
A slow site doesn't just annoy people; it loses visitors before you get to say what you sell. Here's why, and what can be done about it.
When a visitor lands on your site they make their first decision within seconds: stay, or go back. They don't even look at your design while deciding — they haven't seen it yet. The only thing they're reacting to is whether the page opened.
What waiting costs
By Google's own measurements, when a mobile page's load time goes from 1 second to 3, the likelihood of a visitor abandoning it rises sharply. At 5 seconds, that likelihood multiplies.
Here's what really matters: the visitor you lose isn't a random one. That person searched for you, found you and clicked. They were the closest to buying. A slow site turns away your most qualified visitor at the door.
Three common causes of slowness
Uncompressed images. This is the problem I run into most. A 4 MB photo taken on a phone gets displayed at 400 pixels wide, but the browser still downloads all 4 MB. The same image, sized correctly and saved in a modern format (WebP, AVIF), can come down to 80 KB — fifty times smaller.
Unnecessary plugins. A plugin installed in WordPress for one job doesn't get removed when that job is done. Each of fifteen plugins loads its own JavaScript and CSS. Your visitor ends up downloading the code for a slider they will never see.
Off-the-shelf themes. To be "suitable for every need," a theme includes every feature. You use a tenth of them, but all of it loads.
What can be done
The good news: speed isn't an optimisation you bolt on later, it's a decision made at the start. When building a site, this is enough:
- Produce every image at the size it will be displayed, in a modern format
- Load only the code that page actually needs
- Load fonts properly so text isn't kept waiting
- Prioritise the part of the page the visitor sees first
These are technical matters, but the result isn't: the visitor doesn't wait, stays, and finds what they came for.
How to measure your own site
Go to PageSpeed Insights and enter your address. Google gives you a score and lists what's slowing you down. The score itself doesn't matter much — the number to watch is Largest Contentful Paint. Under 2.5 seconds and you're in good shape.
If the result looks bad, don't panic; fixing a handful of images alone often makes a noticeable difference.
- #speed
- #conversion
- #seo
