A slow website loses customers silently. Nobody emails to say they gave up waiting - they just leave, and you never know. Speed is one of the few things on a site that affects both how many people find it and how many of them stay.
Why speed matters
Two reasons. First, search engines use speed as a ranking signal, so a faster site is easier to find. Second, people abandon slow pages - every extra second of load time measurably increases the share who leave before seeing anything. Speed is both an SEO lever and a conversion lever.
Core Web Vitals in plain English
Google measures real-world experience with three metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the main content appears. Fast is under about 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): whether the page jumps around as it loads - the thing that makes you tap the wrong button.
Common causes of slow sites
- Huge, uncompressed images - the single most common culprit.
- Heavy page builders and piles of third-party scripts and trackers.
- Slow or overloaded hosting.
- Doing work on every visit that could be done once and cached.
How to build for speed
Fast sites are the result of decisions, not luck: right-sized images, minimal scripts, sensible hosting, and caching. It is far easier to build fast than to rescue a slow site later. That is why we build websites and web apps to be fast and maintainable from the start.
Tell us about your site and we will point to what is slowing it down.