Google penalises slow sites in search rankings — but visitors leave long before that penalty ever shows up. The commercial cost of a slow site comes first, and it's larger than the SEO cost.
A visitor who clicks through from search or an ad has already shown intent. Every additional second before the page becomes usable is a chance for that intent to evaporate — before they've seen a single word of your offer.
A slow, janky page reads as unprofessional even when the actual business behind it is excellent. Visitors make snap judgments about competence based on how a site feels to use, not just what it says.
Unoptimised images, unnecessary third-party scripts (chat widgets, tracking pixels, embedded fonts), and hosting infrastructure that wasn't built for the site's current traffic are the three most common causes.
The right fix depends entirely on where the actual bottleneck is — optimising images does nothing if the real problem is server response time. Diagnosis has to come before the fix.
Find out exactly where your site's time is going.
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