Is my website too slow, and does it cost me customers?
Worth a look
Probably it costs you a little, and probably less than the people selling speed optimisation suggest. Speed matters most at the extremes: a site that takes over five seconds on a phone loses a meaningful share of visitors before they see anything. Shaving a good site from 2.0 to 1.6 seconds is not where your attention should go.
The numbers worth knowing, and the one that isn't
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — how long until the main thing on the page appears. This is the one that maps to what a visitor experiences as “loading”. Under 2.5 seconds is good.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — how quickly the page responds when someone taps something. A page that looks loaded but ignores taps for a second feels broken.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — how much the page jumps around while loading. This is the one that makes people tap the wrong thing when an advert or image loads late.
The overall score out of 100 is the number not worth agonising over. It's a weighted composite, it moves around between runs, and chasing it from 85 to 95 usually means micro-optimising things no human notices.
What actually makes small-business sites slow
Images, overwhelmingly. A photograph straight off a phone or a stock library is often several megabytes and displayed at a fraction of its size. Resizing and compressing images is unglamorous and routinely accounts for most of the available improvement.
Then plugins and third-party scripts — chat widgets, review badges, analytics, tracking pixels, font services. Each one is a request to somebody else's server that your page waits for. Sites accumulate these the way drawers accumulate cables.
Then hosting. Cheap shared hosting can add a second before your site has done anything at all. This is the fix that costs money rather than effort, and it's worth measuring before assuming.
How much it's really worth
Google does use page experience as a ranking signal, but a minor one — relevance and quality dominate. Being slow won't sink a genuinely good result, and being fast won't rescue a thin one.
The stronger argument is the direct one: people leave. That effect is real, well-measured, and largest on phones and slower connections — which for a local business means people looking for you while they're out, which is often when they most intend to buy.
How to check this yourself
- Run your address through Google's PageSpeed Insights — it's free and needs no account.
- Read the “Discover what your real users are experiencing” section first if it appears. That's field data from actual visitors and is more meaningful than the simulated test below it.
- Look at the Mobile tab rather than Desktop. Desktop scores flatter almost every site.
- Scroll to “Opportunities” and look at the estimated savings in seconds, not the score. Two or three items usually account for nearly all of it.
What to ask your web person
Copy this. It's phrased so you don't have to know the jargon to ask for the right thing.
PageSpeed Insights reports our mobile LCP as [figure]. Could you look at the top two or three opportunities it lists — I suspect image sizes and third-party scripts — and tell me what's realistic? I'd rather fix the big items than chase the score.
Want to know if this applies to your site?
This one is measured by Google's Lighthouse, which takes minutes rather than seconds — so it comes with the in-depth assessment rather than the free check-up. The free check-up still covers your security, your email protection and how search engines see you, in about a minute and with no account.