Speed Is a Feature Nobody Thanks You For

Nobody has ever recommended a business because its website loaded quickly.

But we can assure you that plenty of people have quietly left one because it did not, and none of them told you.

Speed is chronically underfunded. It has no advocate. Every other improvement to a website has somebody who really wants it. A photography shoot for your media assets has the person who commissioned it. The new team's page has all the staff members wanting to look great. The "About Us" video that you spent a lot of money on hoping visitors watch it end to end. The animation has a designer who is super proud of it.

But Speed has nobody, because its benefit is invisible. And the worst thing is, to achieve good speed sometimes requires having to sacrifice some of the above if the website is not well architected.

Imagine this. Somebody is on a train with so-so internet connection. They tap a link on your site to load your Services page. It is so slow that they switch to other tasks waiting for the page to load. They are not committed. They now have other tabs open. Every second your site spends assembling itself is a second in which the reason they clicked the link fades. After a few seconds most of them are gone, and your analytics will record it as a visit rather than a loss.

The businesses this hurts most are the ones least likely to notice. You look at your own site on a good connection, on a good device, in your office, where it is already cached (this means you have loaded the site once before). It feels fine and it is fine. But that's for you.

Want to do a real test? Open your browser on your phone. Go to Private or Incognito mode. Type in your website domain, and start counting "One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi..."

Have you gone past 3? If so, you have problems.

Four most common culprits of the problem:

Images that are far larger than they need to be. This is the biggest one by a distance. A photographer sends through files sized for print. Somebody uploads them directly. Your homepage now moves several megabytes to show a picture of a building. Modern formats and correct sizing usually cut this dramatically with no visible difference to the reader.

Scripts you no longer use. Every tool you have ever trialled tends to leave a tag behind. Chat widgets, heatmaps, multiple analytics tools, a booking system you stopped using 4 years ago. They all load. Audit them once a year and delete without sentiment.

Fonts loading late. Text that appears, then jumps as the real font arrives, makes your site look broken. This is a settings problem, not a design problem, and it is quick to fix.

Hosting that is cheap in the wrong way. If your site is served from the other side of the world on shared hardware, or stored on someone's tin computer located in their garage with the word "Cloud" written in crayon next to it, then no amount of optimisation on your end will rescue it. This is worth checking and rarely worth skimping on.

Run your homepage and your main service page through a free speed test today. Here is a good one: pagespeed.web.dev

Do not chase a perfect score. You will waste a week. Look at one number: how long until the main content is visible on a mid-range phone on a mid-range connection. In PageSpeed this is called Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP. Our rule of thumb is that anything past about three seconds is costing you people you have already paid to attract, and fixing it is cheaper than replacing them.

The analogy is akin to spending lots of money to get people to visit your fast food restaurant. You've done some great advertising. But your food takes too long to cook because the menu is complex, the kitchen is understaffed, the equipment is old, the customer line is stacking up, soon enough, they are frustrated and they leave.