Why a slow website costs you customers

A site that loads slowly feels unreliable before anyone has read a single word. On a phone, with patchy reception, every second counts double. Visitors drop off, and Google sees that and ranks you lower. Slow sites lose twice.

How slow is too slow

Under two seconds nobody notices. Between two and four seconds part of your visitors start clicking away. Above four seconds you have lost half, and on a phone more. Most business sites in the Netherlands sit between three and six seconds.

Test it yourself

Search for "PageSpeed Insights", enter your address, and look at the mobile score. Above 90 is good, between 50 and 90 can be better, below 50 is costing you customers. The test also says exactly what is wrong.

The four causes it almost always is

1. Photos that are too big. A four-megabyte photo where two hundred kilobytes would do. This is cause number one, and the easiest to fix.
2. Too many add-ons. Chat windows, cookie bars, tracking, fonts, plug-ins. Each one loads too.
3. Cheap hosting. A server that serves a hundred other sites responds slowly to the first request.
4. A website builder or a heavy theme. Many sites load code for features they do not use.

How we build

Our sites are plain files without a heavy system behind them. The page is there in under a second, and the video at the top loads in quietly afterwards while the site already works. Photos are resized before they go online. That is why they score high on the speed test without us having to do anything special.