How much a slow website costs you every month
40% of visitors leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Here's how much load time is costing you in lost customers — and how to work out your own number.
Every second your site takes to load, you lose customers. Google ranks slow sites lower. Visitors bounce before they've even seen your headline. This isn't a hypothesis — it's measurable, and the numbers are dramatic.
What does the data say?
Google's own research shows that 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Every additional second reduces conversion by another 7%. For a site with 1,000 visitors per month and 2% conversion, that means a site loading in 5 seconds loses 70% more potential customers than a site loading in 1 second.
It's not just visitors who care. Google uses Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) as direct ranking factors since 2021. A slow site ranks worse — which means fewer visitors in the first place.
A real-world example
Take a local tradesperson:
Scenario A — Site loads in 5 seconds: 500 visits/month × 1% conversion = 5 leads. Average job: €1,500. Potential: €7,500/month.
Scenario B — Site loads in 1 second: 700 visits/month (better SEO) × 3% conversion = 21 leads. Same average job: €1,500. Potential: €31,500/month.
The difference: €24,000 every month. From load time alone.
Why are sites so slow?
In 95% of cases it comes down to one of these:
Heavy images that aren't compressed — a 4 MB PNG instead of a 200 KB WebP. A single sloppy image is enough to halve your load time.
WordPress with 15+ plugins — each plugin adds JavaScript and CSS that must load before the page renders.
Shared hosting without a CDN — the server sits in another country, taking 800 ms just for the response to arrive.
No lazy loading — all images load at once, even the ones out of view.
How we build so this doesn't happen
Our websites load in under 1 second. It's not magic — it's a consequence of technical choices:
Next.js instead of WordPress — the site is statically rendered, no database query needed to show content.
Automatic WebP and lazy loading — images are optimised and only loaded when they're needed.
CDN across Europe — servers sit close to the visitor.
No unnecessary plugins — we build what's needed, nothing else.
The result? 100/100 on Google PageSpeed, lower bounce rate and higher rankings — automatically.
How fast is your site?
Enter your URL into Google PageSpeed Insights and see your score. Or you can order a free SEO analysis from us — we review load time, SEO and technical issues and send you a report within 48 hours. Free of charge.
