What a slow website actually costs you

For business owners · Last reviewed 1 July 2026

Every website gets a score from Google. Zero to one hundred, measured on a mid-range phone over a mobile connection, because that is how most of your customers actually turn up. You can check yours in ten seconds with our free site check. Most local business sites I see come in under 50, and the owner almost always thinks their site is fine. It looks fine, on their laptop, on their office wifi. That is not the test.

Slow pages lose people before they load

The best data on this comes from Google's own research with SOASTA in 2017. As a mobile page goes from taking one second to taking three, the chance of the visitor giving up rises by 32%. Stretch it to five seconds and it rises by 90%. The BBC found the same pattern on their own site: roughly 10% more readers lost for every extra second.

Think about what that means for a plumber or a dental practice. Someone searched for you, found you, tapped your link, and left staring at a white screen. You paid for that visitor, one way or another, and the page speed threw them away.

Speed shows up in the till, not just the analytics

In 2020 Google and Deloitte published a study called Milliseconds Make Millions. They measured what happened when 37 big brands made their mobile sites just 0.1 seconds faster.

These two studies are where nearly every speed statistic you have ever read comes from, so I would rather point you at the originals than recycle them with the numbers rounded up.

Google ranks fast sites higher too

Google has confirmed that page experience, which includes speed, feeds into rankings. They are also clear that relevance matters more, and that is fair. But between two local businesses offering the same thing at the same distance, speed is a tie-breaker. Local search is nothing but tie-breakers. A slow site loses twice: it ranks lower, then it fumbles the visitors it does get.

Where the numbers get oversold

Honesty time, because this industry loves a scary statistic. Most of the research was done on large consumer sites, not ten-page local business sites, so treat the exact percentages as directional rather than gospel. The gains are also not endless: going from dreadful to decent captures most of the value, while chasing a 98 from a 90 mostly buys bragging rights. And some of the correlations you read about are just that. Fast sites tend to be well-run sites, and well-run beats fast. The controlled studies above are the ones that isolated speed itself, which is why they are the only ones I quote.

The fixes that actually pay

The good news is that bad scores usually have boring causes. Enormous photos nobody compressed. An SSL certificate that lapsed and now greets visitors with a security warning. A site that renders desktop-size on a phone. A page builder from 2018 dragging thirty scripts behind it. Any competent web professional can sort the lot in days, and if your score is under 50 the recovered enquiries typically cover the bill quickly.

Step one is knowing where you stand. Run the free check, no sign-up needed, and you will have your score, your grade and your top issues in plain English.