Why your website speed directly affects your sales

You have a website. Maybe you paid for it two years ago, maybe two months ago. But there’s a question you’ve probably never asked yourself: how long does it take to load?

This question matters more than you think. Because your website’s speed doesn’t just affect the experience of your visitors — it directly affects your sales and your Google rankings.

The numbers you should know

Let’s start with the data, because numbers don’t lie.

53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. This isn’t an opinion — it’s a Google and SOASTA study across millions of real visits. More than half your potential customers won’t even see your website if it’s slow.

And we’re not talking about huge delays. Amazon calculated that every 100 milliseconds of delay (a tenth of a second) cost them 1% of sales. Walmart ran a similar experiment: for every second they improved page load time, conversions increased by 2%.

For a small business, this translates to lost enquiries, missed phone calls and forms that nobody submits. Not because your service isn’t interesting, but because your website hasn’t finished loading.

Google penalises slow websites (and it’s official)

Since 2018, when Google launched the Speed Update, page load speed has been a confirmed ranking factor. And in 2021, with the Core Web Vitals update, they made it even more explicit.

Google now measures three specific things about your website:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long it takes for the main content to appear. It should be under 2.5 seconds to pass. Above 4 seconds, you have a serious problem.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how long the website takes to respond when someone interacts with it. The target is under 200 milliseconds.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): whether page elements move while loading (that annoying jump when a button shifts position). It should be below 0.1.

You can check your metrics in Google Search Console, under the Core Web Vitals report. If they’re in the red, your website is losing rankings every day.

The real problem: most small business websites are slow

Here’s where it gets interesting. The average WordPress site — the platform that powers 40% of the internet — scores between 30 and 50 on Google PageSpeed Insights (out of 100). Websites built with Wix typically fall between 40 and 60.

This means the majority of small business websites are literally being penalised by Google. It’s not that they lack good content or that their business isn’t relevant. It’s that the technology they use is too slow.

Why does this happen? Because WordPress and Wix load dozens of JavaScript files, stylesheets, plugins and dynamic databases on every visit. Each plugin adds weight. Each fancy visual effect adds milliseconds. And on mobile, where the connection is slower, everything multiplies.

Why mobile changes everything

If your business is local — a restaurant, a construction firm, a winery, an activity centre — 65% or more of your traffic comes from mobile devices. People search for you while walking down the street, from the car or from the sofa.

A website that works fine on a laptop with fibre broadband can be a disaster on a phone with 4G. And it’s precisely on mobile where you lose the majority of potential customers if your website is slow.

Google knows this, which is why since 2019 they use “mobile-first indexing”: they look at how your website performs on mobile first, desktop second. If it’s slow on mobile, your rankings drop.

What you can do right now

If you’re a business owner and want to know where your website stands, here are three concrete steps:

1. Check your PageSpeed Insights score

Go to pagespeed.web.dev and enter your website URL. If the mobile score is below 90, you’ve got work to do.

2. Review Core Web Vitals in Search Console

If you have access to Google Search Console (and you should), check the Core Web Vitals report. It tells you how many pages are fine, how many need improvement and how many have serious issues.

3. Optimise the basics

Some improvements that anyone can make or ask their developer to handle:

• Images: convert them to WebP format (30-50% smaller than JPEG)
• JavaScript: remove unnecessary scripts (duplicate analytics, chat widgets nobody uses)
• CDN: serve your website from servers close to the visitor (not from a server in the United States)
• Lazy loading: don’t load images that aren’t visible on screen until the user scrolls to them

But let’s be honest: if your website is built with WordPress or Wix and scores 30-50, these optimisations might bring it to 60-70. But not to 100. To reach 95-100, you need a different technology foundation.

How we do it at serpixel

At serpixel (Clever European Business, S.L.) we don’t try to make a slow website fast. We build websites that are fast from the start.

We use Astro, a framework that generates static pages — pure HTML with no unnecessary JavaScript. The website loads instantly because there’s no database, no plugins and no background processes.

Images are automatically converted to WebP/AVIF with responsive sizes. Fonts load in an optimised way. Everything is served from Vercel, a global CDN that delivers the website from the server closest to the visitor.

The result? Every serpixel website scores between 95 and 100 on Google PageSpeed Insights. It’s not a goal — it’s a requirement. If a website doesn’t reach 95, we don’t launch it.

And you don’t need to pay thousands of euros upfront. serpixel (Clever European Business, S.L.) is a web design and SEO subscription service: a monthly subscription during the first 4 months (design + build + launch) and another subscription for ongoing growth (maintenance, SEO content, ongoing optimisation). No upfront cost.

Is your website fast or is it losing customers?

Every second your website takes to load is a potential customer who leaves. Every PageSpeed point below 90 is ranking you’re losing on Google.

Want to know exactly where your website stands? Request a free audit and we’ll show you your real score, what it’s costing you in rankings and how to fix it. No commitment, no fine print.