Why a slow website costs you customers
Loading speed is the most invisible property of your website. You don't see it; you only feel it when you're someone else.
Every extra second of waiting costs visitors before they've seen anything of you. And almost every site is slower on a phone than its owner believes.
Deliberately no number of seconds here: how fast your site is depends on your images and the visitor's device. Measure it yourself — it takes a minute.
What “slow” actually means
The number that counts is the time until the largest visible content appears — usually the big image or the headline at the top. Google calls it Largest Contentful Paint.
Under 2.5 seconds counts as good. From 4 seconds it gets critical. At 9 seconds most visitors are gone before anything was visible.
Why you never notice it on your own site
You open your website from an office machine on WiFi, in a browser that has already cached everything. For you it's instant.
Your customer is on the underground with three bars of signal and has never visited your site. They load everything for the first time over a connection a fraction of yours.
That's exactly why Google measures under phone conditions by default, not under yours.
The three most common causes
In this order, by frequency:
- Images at full camera resolution. A 4 MB photo displayed at 400 pixels wide — that alone explains half of all slow sites.
- Too many third-party services. Chat windows, review widgets, maps, counters, fonts from other servers. Each one looks harmless.
- Builder ballast. Templates load features your site never uses — and usually can't be switched off.
What Google does with it
Loading speed is a ranking factor, but a weaker one than often claimed. Good content on a slow page beats thin content on a fast one.
The real damage is more direct: whoever waits goes back and clicks the next result. That costs you the customer immediately, without Google being involved at all.
Measure it yourself, in a minute
You don't have to take anyone's word for it, including mine. Put your address into the website check on this site — the measurement comes straight from Google, not from me.
You get four scores and the time to the largest visible content. If it says under 2.5 seconds, you're fine. If it says more than 4, now you know.
What's realistically achievable
A well-built business site lands under a second and at 90 to 100 points. That's not a feat, it's a matter of image sizes and discipline with third-party services.
If your site sits at 60, the first 30 points are usually one afternoon's work. The last ten are grind — and often unnecessary.
My provider says my site is fast.
That's the provider's own measurement, often under favourable conditions. Check with Google's tool — it's independent and measures under phone conditions.
Is resizing the images enough?
Often that's half the battle. Images are the single most common cause. The other half is usually third-party services loading in the background.
Do I need to hit 100 out of 100?
No. Anything above 90 is very good, above 70 is fine. Below 50 it gets expensive, because visitors leave before they've seen anything.
Between 300 and 3,000 € — and three things decide where you land.
For a first impression, yes. As your only home, no — and there are two solid reasons.
Written by Florenz Hardt, Berlin. If any of this stops being true, tell me — I keep these up to date.