Your website's speed affects your sales: how to measure it and fix it

A slow website is not just annoying; it costs you money. Visitors who wait too long leave before they see what you offer, and Google penalises slow pages in search results. The good news is that speed can be measured and improved.

Why every second counts

A good share of visitors abandon a website that takes more than a few seconds to load. On mobile, where connections are weaker, the effect is even bigger. Every extra second means lost visitors, and therefore lost sales.

How to measure speed

You do not have to guess. There are free tools that give you a score and tell you exactly what is slowing you down:

• Google PageSpeed Insights. It gives you a score for mobile and desktop and a list of issues to fix.
• Your own test. Open your website on your phone, using mobile data, and get a feel for how long it takes for the content to appear.

What usually slows a website down

• Images that are too large. Photos of several megabytes uploaded without optimisation are the most common cause.
• Heavy code. Themes and plugins that load piles of files for features nobody uses.
• No caching. The website rebuilds every page from scratch on every visit.
• Poor hosting. A crowded or cheap server holds everything back.

How to fix it

The fixes are usually straightforward: compressing images, removing unnecessary code, turning on caching and choosing suitable hosting. On a website built properly from the start, these things are already taken care of, which is why a website built from scratch on clean code is almost always faster than one weighed down with templates and plugins.

How we can help

We can analyse the speed of your current website free of charge, tell you exactly what is slowing it down and how much it can be improved. If the gap is large, it is sometimes worth rebuilding it on a clean foundation. Write to us and we will check it together.