The one-minute check
Open your website on your phone, on mobile data, not Wi-Fi, in a private window so nothing is cached. Count. If the main thing on the page, the headline and photo, appears within two seconds, you are fine. If you are still looking at a white screen at three, this article is about you.
Most small business websites we test take between three and six seconds on that test. Their owners have never noticed, because they open the site on their office Wi-Fi, on a laptop, where it has already loaded a hundred times.
Why two seconds
The number is not arbitrary. Google's threshold for the main content appearing is 2.5 seconds, measured on real visitors' phones. Below it, the page is classed as fast. Above four, it is classed as poor. The middle is "needs improvement", which in practice means "some of your visitors are leaving".
The behavioural research behind those numbers has been consistent for years: the share of people who give up on a page climbs steeply between two and five seconds. Around three, a noticeable fraction have gone. By five, a large share. They did not read your services page. They did not see your reviews. They tapped back and opened the next result, which was your competitor.
What it costs a local business
Work it through for a business that gets 500 visits a month from search, mostly on phones, and converts 4 percent of them into an enquiry or booking. That is 20 enquiries.
If the site takes four seconds and a fifth of visitors leave before it loads, that is 100 people who never saw the page. At the same conversion rate, that is 4 enquiries a month, roughly 50 a year, that went to someone else. For a dentist, a physio, a salon or a trade, 50 lost enquiries is a serious number, and it is invisible: nobody tells you they left.
How Google uses it
Two ways.
Directly. Page speed, as measured on real users, is one of the signals in ranking. It is not the biggest, but between two similar local businesses it is a tiebreaker, and the slow one loses.
Indirectly. A slow site has fewer pages viewed per visit, fewer return visits and more people bouncing straight back to the results. Google notices when searchers keep coming back from your page to click a different one.
Search Console, Google's free tool for site owners, has a Core Web Vitals report that tells you plainly which of your pages are fast, slow or in between, using the real experience of your actual visitors. If you have never opened it, that is the first thing to do.
Why sites are slow
Nearly always one of five things, and usually more than one:
- Photos that are far too large. A phone photo straight from the camera is several megabytes. On a page with six of them, the visitor downloads more data than a short video before they see anything.
- Too many add-ons. Plugins, widgets, chat bubbles, social feeds, tracking scripts. Each is a little slow; twenty together are very slow.
- Cheap hosting. A server shared with hundreds of other sites takes a second to even begin responding.
- Heavy themes and page builders. Templates built to do everything load everything, on every page.
- Fonts and scripts from other websites. Each one is a separate trip across the internet before the page can appear.
None of these are visible to the owner. All of them are fixable.
What fast looks like
A site built properly loads its main content in under a second on a decent phone and under two on a poor connection. Images are sized for phones and compressed. Only the scripts that page needs are loaded. The hosting responds instantly. The fonts arrive with the page rather than after it.
It also feels different. Taps respond immediately. Nothing jumps around while it loads. The booking button is where the thumb lands. Visitors do not consciously notice a fast site. They just do not leave it.
What to do
If you own a slow site: get it measured properly, on a phone, with the real-user data from Search Console. Fix the images first, since that is usually half the problem. Remove the add-ons you do not use. Then decide whether the theme and hosting are worth fixing or whether the site is due a rebuild anyway.
If you are commissioning a site: make speed a requirement in writing. "Passes Google's Core Web Vitals on mobile at launch" is a sentence a developer either commits to or does not. Every site we build does, and it is measured before it goes live, because a beautiful site that takes four seconds to appear is a beautiful site a fifth of your customers never see. Speed is part of what you are buying when you buy a website from us, not an upgrade.