Why page speed costs you jobs

Picture the customer you want. Standing somewhere with one bar of signal, phone in one hand, needing to sort something out right now. They tap your website. It shows a white screen. Two seconds pass. They hit back and tap the next one.

You never knew they existed. Your site did not break, your marketing did not fail, nothing showed up in any report. You simply lost the customer to a page that loaded quicker.

Speed is not a technical nicety

Every 1 second of load delay can cost you 7 percent in conversions. That is the whole argument in one line. Slow does not mean slightly annoying. Slow means a measurable share of the people who already decided to look at you never see anything at all.

And it compounds, because speed also affects whether you get found. Google uses the real experience of loading your pages on a phone as part of how it ranks them. A slow site gets fewer visitors and then converts fewer of the ones it gets.

Test it honestly

Your website feels fast to you for two reasons that have nothing to do with your website. Your browser has it saved already, and you are on good wifi. Your customers are not.

• Open your site on your phone with wifi turned off, somewhere with ordinary signal.
• Try it from a cold start, in a private window, so nothing is cached.
• Time how long until you can actually read something and tap a button, not when the first pixel appears.
• Run Google's free PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and your busiest service page, and read the mobile score, not the desktop one.

If it takes longer than a few seconds to be usable, you have found a leak worth plugging before you spend another cent on ads.

What usually makes a website slow

It is nearly always the same handful of things, and most of them got added with good intentions.

• Enormous photos. A straight-off-the-phone photo can be many times larger than it needs to be, and ten of them on one page is one of the most common causes we find.
• A video that autoplays in the background of the header.
• A pile of plugins, each loading its own code whether the page uses it or not.
• A chat widget, a booking widget, a review widget and a tracking script, all competing to load first.
• A heavy page builder theme carrying features you never turned on.
• Cheap shared hosting that is slow to answer before a single image is even requested.

Notice what is not on that list. Nobody is losing jobs because of their font choice. It is weight, and almost all of the weight is pictures and scripts.

What to fix first

In order, because the first one is usually most of the problem.

• Resize and compress every image. Nothing on a phone needs to be as large as the file your camera produced.
• Remove the autoplaying header video. A good photo does the same job for a fraction of the weight.
• Delete plugins and widgets you do not use, and question the ones you do.
• Make sure the phone number and the booking button are visible and tappable before anything else finishes loading.
• Then look at hosting, if the site is still slow to respond with everything else sorted.

Speed is not the same as a redesign either. Plenty of ugly fast sites win more work than beautiful slow ones, because they let the customer get to the phone number. The websites we build start from that idea: load fast on a phone, say what you do, and make contacting you the easiest thing on the screen.

The point of all of it

A fast website is not an achievement to be proud of. It is just the floor. Everything else you do, your ads, your search rankings, your reviews, ends with somebody waiting for your page to appear. If that moment goes badly, the rest of the money was wasted.

Fix the speed, and then make sure you answer when the phone finally rings. The real cost of a missed call is the other half of the same leak.