Nobody visits a website hoping to admire how quickly it loads.

They visit because they want something: an answer, a price, a product, a phone number, directions or perhaps reassurance that the business they’re considering actually knows what it’s doing.

Website speed only becomes noticeable when it gets in the way.

A page that appears quickly feels effortless. One that leaves somebody staring at a blank screen, waiting for images to appear or watching the layout jump around feels frustrating. And every extra moment you make a potential customer wait gives them another opportunity to leave.

That’s why website speed matters. Not because everybody needs a perfect score from an online testing tool, but because a faster website is generally a better website to use.

And that’s good for visitors, conversions and, to an extent, SEO too.

What do we actually mean by website speed?

Website speed isn’t simply how many seconds it takes until absolutely everything on a page has finished loading.

Modern websites load in stages. Text might appear first, followed by an image, a font or an interactive feature. A page can technically still be loading while already feeling perfectly usable.

That’s why Google introduced Core Web Vitals, which attempt to measure aspects of the experience rather than simply putting a stopwatch against the entire page.

They include measurements relating to how quickly the main content appears, how responsive the page is when somebody interacts with it and whether things unexpectedly move around while the page is loading.

Useful stuff.

But also the sort of terminology that can make website owners believe they need a degree in computer science before they’re allowed to have a contact form.

You don’t.

For most businesses, the important question is much simpler:

Does your website feel fast and responsive to the person using it?

Slow websites make people work harder

Imagine walking into a shop and having to wait five seconds for the door to open.

Then another few seconds before you can see what’s on the shelves.

Then, just as you’re about to pick something up, the shelf moves.

You probably wouldn’t be particularly impressed.

Yet websites routinely do the digital equivalent.

Visitors expect websites to respond when they click something. If every page involves a noticeable wait, using the site starts to feel like work.

That’s particularly important on mobile devices. Someone might be looking at your website while travelling, walking through town or using a less-than-perfect mobile connection. You can’t assume every visitor is sitting at a desk with fast broadband and nothing better to do.

Good website design should remove friction, not introduce it.

Website speed can affect conversions

A conversion doesn’t necessarily mean an online sale.

For a local business it might be somebody completing an enquiry form, clicking a telephone number, requesting a quote, booking an appointment or visiting a premises.

Whatever you’re asking visitors to do, there is usually a journey between arriving on the website and taking that action.

Every unnecessary delay adds friction to that journey.

This doesn’t mean making a page half a second faster will automatically result in a flood of new enquiries. Website performance doesn’t work like that.

But consider two websites offering much the same service.

One loads quickly, is easy to navigate and responds immediately.

The other is sluggish, images gradually appear and clicking between pages involves repeated waiting.

Which business feels more professional?

Website performance becomes part of the impression your business creates. A slow website can make the business behind it feel slow too.

That’s not necessarily fair.

But potential customers don’t have to be fair.

Does website speed affect SEO?

Yes – but it needs a little perspective.

Google uses page experience signals, including Core Web Vitals, as part of its search systems. That makes website performance relevant to SEO.

It doesn’t make it the most important ranking factor.

A lightning-fast page containing poor, irrelevant or unhelpful content isn’t going to leap to number one simply because it loads in the blink of an eye.

Search engines still need to understand what a page is about, whether it answers the searcher’s question and whether it appears useful and trustworthy.

Think of speed as part of the overall quality of the website rather than an SEO trick.

If two pages are both useful and relevant, but one provides a considerably better experience, performance can become part of what separates them.

More importantly, improving speed can help the same visitors you’re trying to attract through SEO in the first place.

There’s little point fighting your way onto page one of Google only to make people wait when they arrive.

Don’t become obsessed with PageSpeed scores

Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights are extremely useful for identifying problems.

They are not a computer game.

The objective isn’t necessarily to reach 100.

A website can score extremely well in a performance test and still be poorly designed, difficult to navigate or ineffective at generating business. Equally, a useful, attractive website might fall slightly short of a perfect performance score while still feeling fast to its users.

Context matters too.

A simple page containing some text and a logo has considerably less work to do than a website containing photography, video, maps, booking systems, ecommerce functionality or other interactive features.

The aim should be to achieve good real-world performance without sacrificing everything that makes the website useful.

Removing every photograph from your website would probably make it faster.

It probably wouldn’t make it better.

What makes websites slow?

There usually isn’t one enormous lever marked MAKE WEBSITE FASTER.

Shame, really. It would make my job considerably easier.

Performance is normally the result of lots of smaller decisions.

Large, poorly optimised images are common culprits. Uploading a photograph straight from a modern camera or phone can mean asking somebody to download an enormous file only to display it at a fraction of its original size.

Hosting matters too. If the server delivering the website is slow or overloaded, there is only so much optimisation elsewhere can achieve.

Then there are plugins, tracking scripts, advertising systems, external fonts, embedded videos, animation and third-party services. Individually they may seem harmless, but collectively they can give a browser an awful lot to do.

This is also why continually adding features to a website without considering their impact can gradually make it slower.

Sometimes the fastest feature is the one you didn’t need in the first place.

Is WordPress slow?

WordPress often gets blamed for slow websites, but WordPress itself isn’t inherently slow.

A well-built WordPress website on suitable hosting can be extremely fast.

Problems usually appear when WordPress is loaded with an unnecessarily heavy theme, dozens of plugins, huge images and assorted scripts accumulated over several years.

It’s a little like filling the boot of a car with paving slabs and then blaming the car manufacturer because the fuel economy has suffered.

How a WordPress website is built, hosted and maintained matters.

Keeping the software updated, removing unnecessary plugins, optimising images, using caching appropriately and choosing decent hosting can all contribute to better performance.

It’s one reason ongoing website care and maintenance shouldn’t simply be thought of as installing updates. A website needs looking after as it changes and grows.

What can you do to improve website speed?

Start with the obvious things rather than disappearing down a technical rabbit hole.

Optimise images before or during upload. Avoid installing plugins for tiny features that could be achieved more efficiently. Think carefully before covering pages with animations, video backgrounds and third-party widgets.

Use good-quality hosting appropriate for the website you’re running.

Caching and content delivery networks can help too, particularly by reducing the amount of work required to deliver frequently requested content.

And test the actual website.

Not just the homepage.

Service pages, blog articles, landing pages and contact pages can all behave differently depending on their content.

Most importantly, test it on a phone.

If your website feels painfully slow when you’re using it, your customers probably aren’t enjoying the experience either.

Faster isn’t always better

There comes a point where website optimisation produces diminishing returns.

If improving a page from noticeably slow to comfortably fast costs a sensible amount of time and money, it’s probably worthwhile.

If you’re spending hours trying to shave a few milliseconds from a page that already loads quickly, there may be better places to invest that effort.

Improve the content.

Make the navigation clearer.

Add better photographs.

Answer the questions customers actually ask.

Make your contact details easier to find.

Performance matters, but it’s one part of a much bigger picture.

Build for people first

Website speed sits at an interesting point between design, development, hosting, SEO and user experience.

Get it badly wrong and it can undermine all of them.

Get it right and most visitors will never even think about it.

That’s exactly what you want.

Your customers don’t care whether your website scored 87, 93 or 100 in a performance test. They care that when they click something, it works; when they want information, they can find it; and when they’re ready to contact you, nothing gets in their way.

Your customers don’t care about your PageSpeed score. They care whether your website feels fast.

A good business website should look professional, answer the right questions and make taking the next step easy.

It should also get out of the visitor’s way quickly enough to let them do it.