Why your website needs to load in under 2 seconds
A slow website drives your visitors away and kills your Google rankings. Here's why speed has become the number one selling point of a professional website.
In 2025, internet users’ patience is at an all-time low. 53% of visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load — and that figure rises to 70% on mobile. If your website is slow, you’re losing customers before they’ve even seen your content.
What Google thinks about speed
Since 2021, Google has been using Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor in its search results. In plain English: a slow website is penalised in Google searches. That means less visibility, fewer clicks, fewer customers.
The three metrics that matter:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — Time to display the main element. Must be under 2.5 seconds.
- FID / INP — Interaction responsiveness. Must be under 200ms.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — Visual stability. Must be under 0.1.
The most common culprits
A slow website is rarely an accident. Here are the problems I encounter most often:
1. Unoptimised images A photo taken on an iPhone can weigh 8 MB. On a website, it should weigh no more than 80 KB. Converting to WebP, resizing, using lazy loading — these simple steps can reduce a page’s weight tenfold.
2. Cheap hosting Budget shared hosting means your server is shared with hundreds of other websites. At peak times, your site crawls. Choosing a good host (or a CDN like Vercel or Cloudflare Pages) changes everything.
3. Too many WordPress plugins Every plugin adds JavaScript, CSS and database queries. An overloaded WordPress site can make 50+ HTTP requests just to display a homepage.
4. No caching Without a cache, your server recalculates the page on every visit. With a well-configured cache, it serves a pre-built version in milliseconds.
What I achieve on my projects
On every website I build, I aim for a Google PageSpeed score above 90 — on both mobile and desktop. This isn’t a bonus, it’s a standard.
How? By building with modern tools like Astro (zero JavaScript by default), optimising every image, using locally hosted fonts and deploying on ultra-fast CDNs.
The concrete result: my clients rank better on Google, have lower bounce rates and convert more visitors into leads.
Want to know where your current site stands? Send me your URL — I’ll do a free speed audit and tell you exactly what’s slowing your site down.