Website speed: how a slow site loses you clients

Think about the last time you opened a website on your phone and it took a while to load. Chances are you hit back and tapped the next Google result. Your clients do exactly the same.

Speed isn’t a technical detail. It’s your business’s first impression, and often the only one.

Why speed matters so much

People don’t wait

A Google study on mobile sites found that more than half of visits are abandoned if the page takes longer than three seconds to load. It doesn’t matter how good your service is: if the page doesn’t show up, the client never sees it.

Google takes it into account

Google measures page experience with a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals and uses them as one of the signals for ranking results. It’s not the only thing that counts, but when two sites are similar, the faster one has the edge. If you want to show up in your area, add this to what we cover in local SEO.

Most people visit from their phone

Often on mobile data, out and about, with a so-so signal. A site that feels fast on the office computer can be painfully slow on a mid-range phone. That’s why we work mobile-first.

How to measure your website’s speed for free

Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), paste your website’s address and look at the mobile result. It shows three main metrics:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long the main content takes to appear. Ideally under 2.5 seconds.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how quickly the page responds when you tap something. Ideally under 200 milliseconds.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): whether content “jumps around” while it loads. Ideally under 0.1.

If you see red numbers, don’t panic: they can almost always be fixed.

The most common causes of a slow site

Huge images

This is problem number one. A photo taken with a phone can weigh several megabytes and be shown in a small box. Images should be resized to the size they’re actually displayed at and saved in modern formats like WebP or AVIF, which weigh much less at the same quality.

Too many plugins and scripts

Every plugin, chat widget, tracking pixel or slider adds code the browser has to download and run. One at a time they seem harmless, but together they slow everything down. It happens a lot on WordPress sites with generic themes; we explain why in WordPress vs. a custom website.

Cheap or overloaded hosting

If the server is slow to respond, everything else waits. Good hosting doesn’t have to be expensive, but the cheapest option on the market is rarely the fastest.

Unoptimized fonts and videos

Custom fonts and background videos look great, but they need to be loaded carefully. A hero video can be light if it’s well compressed and has a placeholder image while it loads.

What you can do today

Some improvements that don’t require rebuilding the site:

1. Find the heaviest images and replace them with compressed versions.
2. Disable plugins or widgets you don’t use.
3. Remove sliders from the homepage: besides being heavy, almost nobody looks past the first slide.
4. Ask your provider whether your hosting has caching and whether it’s turned on.

If the site is still slow after that, the problem is usually in the foundation: the theme, the technology or how it was built.

Speed by design

The cheapest way to have a fast website is to plan for it from the start. At Balboa Web we choose the lightest technology for each project, optimize images and skip code that isn’t needed. It’s part of how we build every website, not an add-on.

And once your site is live, speed needs looking after: every new image or plugin can make it worse. We cover that in what your website needs after launch.

Want to know how fast your site is and what we’d improve first? Get in touch and we’ll take a look.