A slow website does not look like a problem until you put a number on it. Then it becomes the dumbest cost line in your accounts: you pay for advertising to bring people to a page they leave before seeing. Let us look at what it costs, how to measure it and how to fix it.
What a second costs
Data published by Google and by large e-commerce players has told the same story for years: the slower the site, the less it sells.
- When load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of a visitor bouncing rises by about 32%; at 5 seconds, by 90%.
- On mobile, more than half of users abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds.
- Sites that load in 1 second convert, on average, 2-3 times more than those loading in 5.
A concrete example: you spend €1,000 a month on Google Ads, bring 1,000 visits, the site converts at 2% and each customer is worth €100. You make €2,000. If speed halves the conversion rate, you make €1,000 with the same spend. The slow site cost you €1,000 a month, €12,000 a year. Not counting the Google rankings lost, since speed (Core Web Vitals) is among the ranking signals.
Measure your site in 2 minutes
- Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), enter your address, look at the mobile score (that is the one that matters).
- Check the three Core Web Vitals: LCP (how long until the main content shows: under 2.5 s is good), INP (responsiveness to taps: under 200 ms), CLS (how much the page “jumps”: under 0.1).
- Try it from a phone too, on mobile data, not the office Wi-Fi.
If the mobile score is under 50, you have a problem costing you money every day. Between 50 and 80 there is money on the table. Above 90 you are fine.
The most common causes
- Heavy images: 3 MB photos uploaded straight from the camera. Cause number one and the easiest to fix (modern formats such as WebP/AVIF, correct sizes, lazy loading).
- Too many plugins and scripts: every plugin, chat, pixel and widget adds code. Ten “light” plugins make a heavy site.
- Cheap hosting: slow shared servers, no cache, no CDN. The site starts late before loading anything.
- Themes and visual builders: convenient, but they load megabytes of CSS and JavaScript for features you do not use.
- External fonts and videos: five font families and an autoplay video on the homepage.
- No caching: every visit rebuilds the page from scratch.
How to fix it
It depends on how compromised the site is.
- Optimisation (recent site, sound structure): image compression, caching, CDN, removing useless plugins, lazy loading. A 1-3 day job that often takes you from 40 to 80+ points. At rivoluzionif it is included in the initial check-up of the Care plan or billed as a €149 fix.
- Hosting change: if the server is the bottleneck, migrating to modern hosting with a CDN changes everything. Half a day of work.
- Rebuild: if the site is five years old, with a heavy builder and thirty plugins, optimising it is like polishing a car with no engine. A new site built with modern static technology loads in under a second and costs less than you think.
Prevention: the rules we follow on every site
- Technologies that generate static pages where possible: no database queried on every visit.
- Images optimised automatically at publish time.
- Self-hosted fonts, limited to two families.
- Third-party scripts loaded only after consent and only where needed.
- Hosting on a global network with CDN and HTTP/3.
- Declared target: Lighthouse 90+ on mobile, verified before delivery.
In short
Speed is not a technical detail: it is your conversion rate, your Google ranking and the return on every euro of advertising. Measure your site today; if the mobile score is under 50, fixing it is the fastest-returning investment you can make.
Want us to handle it? Written quote in 24 hours.