A slow website costs you customers: why speed sells

Every second of load time costs you sales. Why your website's speed matters so much for Google and your customers, and how to measure it.

A slow website loses customers before they even see what you offer. Plenty of people won't wait: if a page takes more than three seconds to show something useful, they close it and go back to Google to tap the next result. Worse still, you don't even notice it in your stats, because someone who leaves before the page finishes loading often doesn't even count as a visit.

This isn't a technical matter that only worries developers. It's money: bookings that don't come in, forms that don't get sent, calls that end up with a competitor. In this post we explain what happens when your site is slow, how Google measures speed, why so many websites drag, how to measure yours in five minutes and what to fix first.

What happens when your website takes too long to load

Think about how your customers search. A tourist in Port de Sóller looks up “seafood restaurant” on their phone, with patchy signal and three tabs open. Someone in Inca needs a plumber because the kitchen is flooding. Neither of them has any patience: they open the top results and stick with the first one that shows them what they need. If your site sits blank while a homepage video loads, you've lost that race even if your menu or your service is better.

Slowness costs you even when visitors do wait. A page that jumps around while loading makes people tap the wrong button; a menu that's slow to open feels neglected; a form that hangs after you press send leaves people wondering whether it went through. Each of those small bits of friction chips away at trust at exactly the moment the customer was deciding whether to call you.

How Google measures speed: Core Web Vitals

Google knows this, which is why it measures speed with Core Web Vitals: three metrics that affect your ranking and sum up the real experience of people visiting your site.

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures loading: how long the main content takes to appear, usually the large image or headline on the homepage. Good is 2.5 seconds or less. INP (Interaction to Next Paint) measures interactivity: how long the page takes to respond when you tap a button or open a menu. Good is 200 milliseconds or less. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measures visual stability: how much elements move around while the page loads. Good is 0.1 or less.

One important detail: Google assesses these metrics using data from real users and looks mainly at the mobile version of your site. That's why a page that runs perfectly on the office computer, on fibre, can be failing as far as Google is concerned. A fast website doesn't just convert more: it also has an easier time climbing the results, especially when it's up against others with similar content.

Why so many Mallorca websites are slow

The problem is that many Mallorca websites are built on heavy templates and plugins that slow them down. They work, but they drag extra seconds on every visit, especially on mobile. When we review them, the same causes turn up almost every time.

Images uploaded straight from the camera or stock library, several megabytes each, displayed at a small size on screen. Page builders that load the code for every block they offer even if the page uses three. Sliders and homepage videos that delay precisely the content LCP measures. A collection of plugins — cookies, chat, social media, reviews, two caching plugins fighting each other — adding scripts to every page. And cheap shared hosting that's slow to respond before it even starts sending the site.

None of this is unusual or embarrassing: it's what happens when a website grows over the years without anyone reviewing the whole. A hotel adds a booking engine, then a chat, then a seasonal pop-up, and each one makes sense on its own. It's the sum that weighs it down.

How to measure your website in five minutes

You can measure your site for free with Google's PageSpeed Insights: it gives you a score from 0 to 100 and tells you what's slowing your page down. To get something useful out of it, follow four steps. First, look at the mobile result, not desktop. Second, check whether there's a block of real-user data at the top: if there is, that's what counts for Google, more than the lab score. Third, don't just test the homepage: also test the page you most need to work, whether that's bookings, the menu or a specific service. Fourth, run the test a couple of times, because the score varies from one run to the next.

If you're below 90 on mobile, there's room — and money — on the table. If you'd rather not wrestle with the jargon, our free website audit gives you speed alongside SEO and accessibility, explained in plain English with what's worth improving first.

What to fix first (and what not to)

With the report in front of you, sort by impact. First up is usually images: resizing them to the size they're actually displayed at and serving them in modern formats such as WebP or AVIF is often the change you notice most. Second, the main block on your homepage: it shouldn't depend on a slider or a video, and it shouldn't be lazy-loaded, because that's exactly what LCP measures. Third, third-party scripts: chats, tracking pixels, maps and widgets that aren't used on that page should go, or load only when they're needed. After that, a properly configured cache — just one — and space reserved for images and cookie banners, so the page doesn't jump while it loads.

What isn't worth it is obsessing over the last point of the score, installing a “miracle” optimisation plugin on top of ten others, or removing useful content just to gain a few tenths. And if the site still scores very low after all that, the problem is probably the foundation, and it's time to ask whether to redesign your website or fix the one you have.

Speed and hosting: the part you don't see

There's one part of speed that no tweak inside the website can fix: how long the server takes to respond. If your hosting is overloaded, badly configured or has no server-level caching, every visit starts late before the first byte even arrives. In PageSpeed you'll see it as a high server response time. Properly sized hosting, with HTTPS, compression and a CDN, is the foundation on which optimising everything else makes sense.

And speed isn't fixed once and for all. Every new plugin, every seasonal photo uploaded without compression and every theme update can send you back to square one. That's why it's worth measuring again every few months and after any major change, just as you'd review the rest of your site's technical SEO.

How we handle speed at Teix

We build websites with modern technology (no heavy templates) built to load fast and score in the green on PageSpeed, on mobile too. We practise what we preach: measure the speed of this very website and compare it with yours.

If you already have a website and don't want to rebuild it, we can work on what's there: optimising images, cleaning up plugins, tuning the cache and reviewing the hosting. And if the foundation has nothing more to give, we approach it as a new web design that keeps what's already working for you on Google.

Want to know how yours is doing? We'll run a free speed audit and tell you what can be improved. Speed is also the starting point of our SEO service, because without a fast website everything else only half works.

Sources: web.dev: Web Vitals (LCP, INP and CLS) · Google: understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results · Google: about PageSpeed Insights