Most people won't wait more than a few seconds for a page to load. If your website is slow, a significant portion of your visitors will leave before they've seen anything — and they'll visit a competitor instead.
Speed isn't a nice-to-have. It directly affects how many enquiries your website generates.
The impact on user experience
Research consistently shows that visitors abandon pages that take more than 2–3 seconds to load. On mobile, where connection speeds are variable, the problem is worse. Every second of delay increases the likelihood that a visitor leaves without contacting you.
For a small business, losing even a fraction of potential enquiries to slow load times is a real cost — one that's invisible but constant.
The impact on Google rankings
Page speed is a confirmed Google ranking factor. Slow websites rank lower in search results than faster ones, all else being equal. This means fewer visitors reaching your site in the first place.
Google's Core Web Vitals — a set of performance measurements — now directly influence rankings. Hosting is one of the biggest factors in these scores. Read more about how your host affects your Google rankings.
What makes a website slow?
The most common causes of slow websites are:
- Cheap or overcrowded hosting — budget hosts pack too many sites onto a single server, slowing everything down
- No CDN — without a Content Delivery Network, files are served from a single location, which is slower for visitors who are geographically distant from that server
- Unoptimised images — large image files that haven't been compressed or resized
- Too many plugins or scripts — common on WordPress sites that have accumulated unnecessary tools over time
How hosting affects speed
Your hosting provider is the foundation. Even a well-built website will be slow if it's on poor hosting. A fast host with a CDN makes pages load quickly regardless of where the visitor is in the UK.
Our website hosting uses Cloudflare's global CDN as standard — £20/month or £220/year for custom and WordPress sites. Speed is built in, not something you have to configure yourself.
If your website is currently slow, get in touch and we can assess what's causing it.