Your Slow Site Costs You Money

Your website is measurably like molasses, streaming like a sloth on sedatives, downloading like a decelerating DeLorean with a new driver. It's slooooooow, at least compared to how performant it should be. More importantly, your sluggish site is a significant drag to your bottom line.

Not me, you say? Maybe. After all, we don't know your website specifically or the business goals it seeks to accomplish. The numbers, well, they tell a different story:

• Less than half of websites today (49%) have a good Core Web Vitals score, the three performance metrics that Google factors into their search rankings;
• The median speed index for mobile experiences is 6.1 seconds, which is more than double of what is considered an acceptable score (3 seconds);
• Mobile users account for 61.85% of all Internet traffic as of 2024;
• Median page weight on mobile is 2.4MB, a 37% increase from 5 years ago
• More than 60% of Google searches come from mobile devices.

Statistically, if you are reading this, your website is, at best, not performing as well as you expect and, at worst, not as good as your competitors. As more people use their smartphones to find information quickly, they expect instant results. On a site with a slow or delayed experience, a six-second delay can cause stress similar to taking a math test or watching a horror movie. That's why page speed is important—speed is strongly correlated to user experience and people can always choose to go elsewhere.

Case studies articulating the meaningful impact of performance optimization are not hard to find:

• Reducing mobile site speed by 0.1 seconds results in an 8% increase in conversions for retail sites and 10% for travel site
• Adobe cut their speed score in half and increased engaged visit rate by 35%
• SpeedSense increased mobile transactions by almost 30% equating to an additional $6 million in annual revenue
• The Economic Times reduced bounce rates by 43%

Now that you have accepted the problem and seen the potential benefits, what now? The good news is that optimization objectives are largely relative and not absolute. More to the point, you don't need to fully overhaul your site or aim for a 100/100 PageSpeed score to get results; incremental changes and repeated lab and field testing are often the best strategy for success. An individualized site audit is the only way to get a true plan of action, but techniques to improve your page speed might include:

1. Lazy load offscreen images and iFrames — deferring heavy-bandwidth content until those assets are required can significantly improve initial load speed; amazingly, only 36.7% of web pages take the basic steps to implement native lazy loading;
2. Critical CSS — segmenting the essential styles needed to render the initial page defers other, render-blocking resources and improves the perceived performance of a page;
3. Next-gen image formats — WebP and AVIF images are typically 25% to 50% smaller than jpgs at the same level of visual quality;
4. Responsive images — a collection of image assets for one image location that allows web browsers to select the appropriately-sized asset for the experience, i.e., no giant desktop images downloading to a phone;
5. Regular auditing — tools like PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, or monitoring of search and core web vitals through Google Search Console can help identify and resolve problems;
6. Reduce underperforming content — Tracking scroll depth and behavior analysis with HotJar or CrazyEgg can identify underperforming content for potential removal;
7. Cache is your friend — Intelligently storing page data in server cache makes retrieval of the first byte to the web browser appreciably faster.

Ultimately, web performance is about achieving business goals and improving conversions. Improving web performance isn’t a one-size-fits-all process—it requires a tailored approach based on your site’s unique structure, audience, and goals. Identifying the right strategies, from optimizing media to refining code, takes insight, experience, and ongoing analysis. That’s why partnering with a knowledgeable team is essential. With the right expertise guiding the way, you can make meaningful improvements that not only enhance speed and usability but also drive real results.