Speed isn't a vanity metric. It directly affects how many visitors become customers. The data has been consistent for over a decade: faster sites convert better, rank higher, and keep people around longer.
The numbers
Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found that mobile sites loading in 1 second convert 3x better than those loading in 5 seconds. These aren't edge cases — they're consistent findings across thousands of studies.
What slows most small business sites down
Uncompressed images. A single unoptimised photo can be 4–6MB. Multiply that by a gallery page and you have a site that takes 10+ seconds to load on mobile. Images should be compressed and served in modern formats like WebP.
Too many plugins. WordPress sites in particular tend to accumulate plugins — each one adds JavaScript and CSS that the browser has to download and parse before anything is shown.
Shared hosting. Cheap hosting plans put hundreds of sites on one server. When your neighbours get traffic, your site slows down.
No caching. Without caching, every visitor triggers a full database query and page render. With caching, most visitors get a pre-built page instantly.
How to check your speed
Go to pagespeed.web.dev and enter your URL. You'll get a score from 0–100, with specific recommendations for improvement. Anything above 90 on mobile is excellent. Below 50 is a problem worth fixing urgently.
On sites we build, mobile Lighthouse scores above 95 are standard — not because of clever tricks, but because performance is built in from the start.