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 decides whether to stay within the first few seconds — if the page hasn't loaded meaningful content by then, that decision is often already made before any SEO penalty ever comes into play.
A slow, laggy site can unconsciously read as unprofessional or poorly maintained, independent of how good the actual content or design is — speed itself carries a credibility signal.
Unoptimised images, excessive third-party scripts, and unnecessary render-blocking resources account for the large majority of real-world slow-loading pages — usually fixable without a full rebuild.
Generic speed advice helps less than identifying the actual, specific bottleneck on a given site — the same symptom (slow load) can have very different underlying causes requiring different fixes.
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