Website load time: why slow pages cost customers

Picture a shop whose door only opens after eight seconds. Most customers would be gone. Online it is the same, just less visible: nobody complains, they simply click over to the competition.

What slowness actually costs

Visitors: After roughly three seconds of load time a large share of visitors already abandons the site, on mobile even faster. Every abandonment is an enquiry that never gets made.

Google rankings: Load time feeds directly into the assessment. Google wants to show its users fast results, so slow pages start with a handicap, no matter how good the content is.

Trust: A sluggish website feels like a neglected shop window. Visitors unconsciously judge the company by the site.

The two-minute self-test

Open pagespeed.web.dev, enter your address and look at the “Performance” score for mobile devices (that is the one that counts): 90 to 100 is good, 50 to 89 has room to improve, under 50 is a real problem. A second test, with no tool at all: open your website while out and about on the mobile network, not on the office Wi-Fi. That is what your customers experience.

The most common brakes, explained plainly

Huge images. The 8 MB photo uploaded straight from the camera, brake number one, and the easiest one to fix: images belong resized and delivered in modern formats.

Website builder and system dead weight. Website builders and many off-the-shelf systems load technology for a thousand features, of which your site uses three. This dead weight usually cannot be switched off there, one of the reasons for our website builder comparison.

Too many third-party components. Every embedded extra, little chat window, tracking, fonts from third-party providers, video embeds, loads from external servers. It all adds up.

Cheap hosting. If the server itself responds sluggishly, even the finest optimisation is no help.

What you can do yourself, and what you cannot

Doable yourself: resize images (many systems offer this), remove unnecessary extras and plugins, use video embeds sparingly. Not doable yourself: the brakes in the foundation, the system’s dead weight, server settings, technical structure. Whether renovating your foundation is worth it or a rebuild would be cheaper, we tell you honestly after an analysis.

The standard we hold ourselves to

Load time under one second is our benchmark, and you are experiencing it right now on this website. As developers we fix the causes ourselves instead of sending out to-do lists: SEO at murmy. Whether your site needs more speed and what that would cost, the price calculator settles in two minutes.