53% of mobile users abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Gone before they've seen a single word of your content. Google published that stat in 2017. We think about it a lot.
Most small business websites in the Ottawa Valley load in five, six, seven seconds on mobile. Some take ten. That's not an exaggeration — we've tested them.
Why Websites Get Slow
The most common culprit is WordPress bloat. A site gets built with a page builder theme like Divi or Elementor, a few dozen plugins get added over the years, every plugin loads its own CSS and JavaScript whether the page needs it or not, and nobody ever cleans it up. The site works. It's just slow.
Other common causes:
- Images that were never compressed — a full-resolution JPEG uploaded from a camera can be 8MB. A properly sized WebP version of the same image is 80KB. That's not a typo.
- Google Fonts loading from an external server — adds a DNS lookup and a render-blocking request on every page load
- JavaScript that loads before the page renders — slows everything down even if the script isn't needed immediately
- No caching — the server rebuilds the page from scratch on every single visit instead of serving a cached version
What Slow Load Times Actually Cost You
Google penalizes it
Page speed is a ranking factor. A slow site ranks lower than a fast one with equivalent content. Google measures Core Web Vitals — LCP (how fast the main content loads), TBT (how long the page is unresponsive), and CLS (how much the page jumps around while loading). A slow site is fighting against its own SEO.
Amazon did the math
In early A/B tests, Amazon found that every 100 milliseconds of added load time reduced sales measurably. That's Amazon scale, but the principle holds: slow sites convert worse than fast ones. A study by Portent found that a site loading in 1 second converts at 3x the rate of a site loading in 5 seconds.
It signals quality
Visitors don't analyze why a site feels slow — they just form an impression. A slow site feels unprofessional. It signals that the business doesn't care about the details. That impression transfers to how they feel about hiring you.
How to Check Your Speed
Go to pagespeed.web.dev and enter your URL. Run the mobile test. Google will give you a score from 0–100 and tell you exactly what's causing the problems.
| Metric | What it measures | Good | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | How long until the main content is visible | ≤ 2.5s | > 4.0s |
| TBT | How long the page is unresponsive to input | ≤ 200ms | > 600ms |
| CLS | How much elements jump around while loading | ≤ 0.1 | > 0.25 |
If your score is below 50 on mobile, it's costing you business. Below 30 and we'd consider it a serious problem.
What We Build For
Every site we build targets a 90+ Lighthouse score on mobile. The way we get there:
- Images converted to WebP at appropriate sizes, with
srcsetso mobile gets a smaller file than desktop - Fonts self-hosted — no external DNS lookups, no render-blocking
- CSS and JavaScript minified and bundled. Nothing loads that isn't needed
- No page builders, no plugin bloat. Lean PHP and vanilla JS
- Proper caching headers so repeat visits are nearly instant
If you want to know why your current site is slow and what it would take to fix it — or if you want to build something new that loads fast from day one — get in touch.