The real cost of a slow website

"The site's a bit slow" sounds like a minor complaint. It isn't. Load time connects directly to money in four places.

1. People leave before it loads

The widely‑cited figure from Google's own research: as page load time goes from one second to three, the probability that a visitor bounces rises by around 32%. From one to five seconds, it roughly doubles. From one to ten, it's about 2.5 times.

These are people who wanted what you offer, found you, and left because they waited too long for a blank screen. You paid to get them there — through ads, SEO, or word of mouth — and the site lost them at the door.

2. The ones who stay convert less

Slower sites convert worse even among visitors who don't bounce. Studies across retail and lead‑gen consistently find that each additional second of load time costs a meaningful slice of conversions — often quoted around 7% per second in the range that matters. The mechanism is simple: friction accumulates, patience runs out, the form doesn't get finished.

3. Your ads cost more

If you run Google Ads, landing page experience — which includes load speed — is part of your Quality Score. A poor score means you pay more per click for the same position, or you lose the position. A slow landing page is a tax on every campaign pointed at it.

4. Search visibility takes a hit

Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor. It's a modest one — a tiebreaker rather than a headline — but "modest" across every query you compete for still adds up, and it compounds with everything above.

Putting a number on it

Take a business getting 5,000 visits a month with a 3% enquiry rate — 150 enquiries. Suppose the site loads in 5 seconds and could load in 2.

• Cutting bounce gets you perhaps 15–20% more visitors actually landing on the page.
• Better conversion among them adds a few more percent on top.

Conservatively, that's 20–30 extra enquiries a month from the same traffic and the same ad spend. Whatever a customer is worth to you, multiply.

The good news

Performance problems are usually a handful of fixable things — oversized images, too many scripts, no caching, an overloaded host. It's rarely a rebuild. A focused pass often takes a site from "a bit slow" to "fast" in days, and the return shows up in the next month's numbers.

If you want to know what your slow pages are costing you, we can measure it and fix it.