Why website speed matters (and how to check yours)
A slow website costs you quietly. People leave before the page has loaded, so they never see what you offer, and you never know they were there. The upside is that speed can be measured and fixed. This guide covers why it matters for your business, and how to check your own site in a couple of minutes.
Why speed matters
When a page is slow to appear, people leave. That is especially true on phones, where a lot of your visitors are on a patchy mobile connection and won't wait around for a heavy page. Every extra second is another chance for someone to give up and tap back to the search results.
Speed also affects whether people find you at all. Google has said for years that it uses page speed and overall page experience as part of how it ranks results, and its Core Web Vitals put a public number on exactly that. A fast site is not guaranteed to outrank a slow one, but when two sites are otherwise similar, the slow one starts at a disadvantage.
For the visitors who do stay, speed shapes what they do next. A site that responds straight away feels trustworthy and easy to use, so more people stay long enough to get in touch or buy. A sluggish one makes even a good business look amateur. I won't quote you an exact conversion figure, because honestly it varies from site to site, but the direction is well established: slower sites convert worse.
What makes a site slow
Slowness is rarely one big fault. It is usually a pile of small ones, and most of them trace back to how the site was built.
- Page-builders and heavy themes. Drag-and-drop tools, including a lot of Wix and WordPress setups, add hidden code to give you that flexibility, and your visitor downloads all of it.
- Too much code and unused scripts. Many templates load features you never use, and every plugin you switch on brings its own baggage along for the ride.
- Large, unoptimised images. A photo straight off a phone or a stock library can weigh several megabytes. Put a few on one page and the load time climbs quickly.
- Too many third-party add-ons. Chat widgets, popups, tracking pixels and social embeds each call out to another server before your page can settle.
How to check your own speed
You don't have to guess at any of this. Google has a free tool called PageSpeed Insights that gives you a straight answer in under a minute.
- Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste in your web address, and run the test.
- Look at the mobile score first. Most people reach you on a phone, and mobile is almost always the harder score to get right.
- Read the Core Web Vitals underneath. In plain terms, LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is how long until your main content actually shows up on screen. The rest measure how steady and responsive the page feels while it loads.
For a reference point, run that same test on this site, olliverweb.co.nz. It scores 100 out of 100, because it is hand-built and static rather than assembled from a page-builder. That is the difference the underlying build makes, and you can check it yourself rather than take my word for it.
What you can do about it
There are two levels to fixing this. The quick wins are worth doing on almost any site. Compress your images before they go up, so a hero photo is measured in kilobytes instead of megabytes, and strip out the plugins and widgets you no longer use. Those changes on their own can lift a poor score into a more respectable one.
The real fix is a different thing. When a site is slow because of how it was built, there is a low ceiling on how far tuning will take you. A site that is engineered to be fast from the first line of code starts fast and stays that way, without the constant upkeep. That is what I build for small-business websites and online stores: engineered to load quickly on the phones your customers are actually using. The Back to Nature Tours rebuild was largely a speed story: a dated, sluggish site redesigned from the ground up into one that loads fast, kept its Google rankings through the move, and is updated by the owner himself.
If you are weighing up that kind of rebuild against a patch-up, my guide to what a website costs in NZ walks through the numbers.
Related guides
Find out what's slowing your site down
A $100 website audit gives you your real PageSpeed score and a plain-English breakdown of what is dragging it down, from oversized images to scripts you don't need. You get the fee back in full if you go ahead with a build.
Common questions about website speed
What's a good website speed score?
On Google PageSpeed Insights, a score in the green (90 to 100) is genuinely good, and the mobile score is the one to watch because it is the harder one to reach. Plenty of small-business sites sit well below that without the owner ever realising. Anything in the 50s or lower is worth acting on.
Does speed really affect Google ranking?
Yes, though it is one signal among many rather than the whole story. Google uses page experience, which includes the Core Web Vitals, as part of how it ranks pages. Speed won't rescue thin content, but between two comparable sites the faster one has the edge.
Why is my Wix or WordPress site slow?
Usually because of how much these platforms load in order to stay flexible. Themes and page-builders add code you never see, and plugins and unoptimised stock images pile more on top. Some Wix and WordPress sites run fine, but slowness is common and it is rarely down to a single cause.
How do I test my website speed?
Go to pagespeed.web.dev, enter your address, and read the mobile score and the Core Web Vitals. If you use Chrome, the built-in Lighthouse tool inside the developer tools runs the same checks. Both are free to use.
Can a slow site be fixed, or does it need rebuilding?
It depends on why it is slow. Oversized images and surplus plugins can be sorted on the existing site. When the slowness is baked into the platform or theme, tuning only takes you so far, and a rebuild that is fast by design becomes the more lasting fix. An audit tells you which situation you are in.