Page Speed Explained: Why Your Website's Loading Time Is Killing Your Revenue
Page speed isn't just a technical metric — it directly impacts your search rankings, conversion rates, and customer trust. Here's what to measure, what scores to aim for, and how to fix a slow site.
You've probably heard that your website should be "fast." But what does that actually mean? How fast is fast enough? And why should you care about milliseconds when you're trying to run a business?
Here's the short version: page speed is money. Faster sites rank higher, convert better, and build more trust. Slower sites bleed customers to competitors who figured this out first.
What "Page Speed" Actually Measures
Page speed isn't a single number. It's a collection of metrics that describe how quickly your website loads and becomes usable. The ones that matter most are Google's Core Web Vitals:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
How long until the biggest piece of content on the page (usually the hero image or main heading) is visible.
- Good: under 2.5 seconds
- Needs improvement: 2.5 - 4 seconds
- Poor: over 4 seconds
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
How long the page takes to respond when someone clicks a button or interacts with an element.
- Good: under 200 milliseconds
- Needs improvement: 200 - 500 milliseconds
- Poor: over 500 milliseconds
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
How much the page content jumps around while loading. Ever try to tap a button on your phone only to have the page shift and you tap an ad instead? That's layout shift.
- Good: under 0.1
- Needs improvement: 0.1 - 0.25
- Poor: over 0.25
Why Page Speed Matters for Your Business
1. Search Rankings
Google has used page speed as a ranking factor since 2010, and Core Web Vitals became an official ranking signal in 2021. A slow site literally pushes you down in search results.
This doesn't mean speed alone will get you to #1 — content and relevance still matter most. But if you and a competitor have similar content, the faster site wins.
2. Conversion Rates
The data here is consistent and dramatic:
- Portent found that a site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds
- Google found that as page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 32%
- Amazon calculated that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales
You may not be Amazon, but the principle holds. Faster sites make more money.
3. Customer Trust
Speed signals quality. A fast, smooth website tells visitors that you're professional, modern, and detail-oriented. A slow, janky website — even if the content is great — creates doubt.
First impressions are formed in about 50 milliseconds. Your site's speed is part of that impression whether you like it or not.
How to Check Your Site's Speed
The easiest tool is Google PageSpeed Insights. Paste in your URL and you'll get scores for both mobile and desktop, along with specific recommendations.
Key things to look at:
- Performance score — 90+ is good, 50-89 needs work, below 50 is a problem
- Core Web Vitals assessment — pass or fail
- Opportunities and diagnostics — specific things you can fix
Important: Always check your mobile score, not just desktop. Mobile scores are almost always lower, and mobile is what Google uses for ranking.
Common Speed Killers
Unoptimized Images
This is the #1 issue on most sites. A single uncompressed photo from your phone can be 5-10MB — larger than many entire web pages should be.
Fix: Convert images to WebP format, resize them to the actual display size, and use lazy loading for images below the fold.
Too Many Plugins/Scripts
Every WordPress plugin, analytics script, chat widget, and social media embed adds weight to your page. Many sites load 20-30 third-party scripts before any actual content appears.
Fix: Audit your plugins. Remove anything you're not actively using. For scripts, load non-critical ones asynchronously or defer them.
Cheap Shared Hosting
Budget hosting ($3-5/month plans) puts your site on a server with hundreds of other sites. When one of them gets traffic, everyone slows down.
Fix: Upgrade to managed hosting or a platform like Vercel or Cloudflare Pages that serves your site from edge servers worldwide.
Render-Blocking Resources
CSS and JavaScript files that must load before the page can display anything. If these files are large or load from slow servers, your entire page waits.
Fix: Inline critical CSS, defer non-essential JavaScript, and minimize the total amount of CSS/JS your page requires.
What Good Looks Like
For reference, a well-optimized small business website should:
- Load in under 2 seconds on mobile
- Score 90+ on PageSpeed Insights (desktop) and 80+ (mobile)
- Pass all three Core Web Vitals
- Have a total page weight under 1.5MB
These aren't impossibly high standards. They're what modern web development practices produce by default when you build things correctly from the start.
The Bottom Line
Page speed isn't a vanity metric for developers to obsess over. It's a direct lever on your revenue, search visibility, and customer perception. The good news is that most speed issues are fixable — and the ROI on fixing them is immediate.
Want to know how your site really performs? Get a free website evaluation and we'll run a full speed and performance audit — no cost, no obligation.