Develop24h / Insights / Performance

How website speed affects conversions.

A one-second delay in page load time can cost you 7% of your sales. A three-second delay can cost you 40% of your visitors before they even see your homepage. Here is the data, the cause, and the fix.

— The data

Speed is not nice to have.

Google has been telling website owners about the importance of speed for over a decade. Most owners ignore it because they think their site loads fast enough. The truth is that almost every website is slower than it should be, and the cost of that slowness is usually invisible — until you actually measure it.

The relationship between speed and conversions is not subtle. Industry data is consistent across thousands of studies. Faster sites convert better. Slower sites bleed customers. The cost of one extra second of load time is enormous, especially for service businesses where every visitor represents real revenue.

The numbers nobody tells you

— Why sites are slow

The usual culprits.

Slow websites are not slow because of bad luck. They are slow because of specific, fixable problems. The same handful of issues account for 90% of speed problems on the web. Fix them and you fix your speed.

— 01

Huge images

A photo straight from a camera can be 5MB. The same photo properly compressed is under 200KB. Most slow sites are crushed by un-optimised images.

— 02

Bloated themes

Wordpress themes loaded with features you do not use, each one adding scripts and stylesheets that slow the page.

— 03

Too many plugins

Every plugin adds load. Wordpress sites with 30+ plugins are almost always slow.

— 04

Cheap shared hosting

Hosting your site on a server shared with 500 other sites. The cheap monthly price comes at the cost of speed.

— 05

No caching

Generating every page from scratch every time, instead of serving cached versions. Easy fix, huge improvement.

— 06

Third-party scripts

Chat widgets, analytics, ad networks — each one slows the page. Many are not even being used.

— The fix

Faster sites are built differently.

You cannot bolt speed onto a slow website. You can squeeze marginal improvements out of plugins and caching, but the only way to get a genuinely fast site is to build it that way from the foundation. This is why every Develop24h website is hand-coded with performance as a priority, not an afterthought.

A modern, properly built website should load in under 2 seconds on mobile, even on a 4G connection. Anything slower is leaving money on the table. If your site takes longer than that, you are paying a tax in lost customers every single day.

How to test your own site

If your scores are below this and you want to know how much it is costing you and how to fix it, talk to us. A site rebuilt for speed almost always pays for itself in recovered conversions within the first quarter.

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