Now taking new projects, limited availability each month.
THOUGHTS / BEGINNERS GUIDE 7 Jun 2025 7 MIN READ

What Is Page Speed and Why Does Your Website's Loading Time Matter?

There is a moment, waiting for a page to load, when the patience of most internet users simply runs out. Research puts it at around three seconds — after which, quietly and without drama, they go somewhere else. The website they were about to read gets no second chance. Page speed is the measure of how quickly that moment does or does not arrive, and it affects not only whether people stay, but whether Google shows your site to them in the first place.

Page speed is how quickly your website loads for visitors. It affects both user experience and Google rankings — slow sites lose visitors and rank lower in search results. The biggest culprits are large images, too many third-party scripts (like chat widgets or advertising trackers), and cheap shared hosting. You can test your site for free using Google PageSpeed Insights. The single most impactful fix for most small business websites is compressing and resizing images properly before uploading them.

Most people expect a website to load within two to three seconds. Studies consistently show that if a page takes longer than three seconds, more than half of visitors will leave — and on mobile, where connections can be slower, the problem is worse. You may have a beautifully designed website, but if it loads slowly, most of your potential customers will never see it.

Speed is not just about impatience. Google uses page speed as one of its ranking signals — a faster website is more likely to appear higher in search results than an equally relevant but slower one. This is directly connected to what Google calls Core Web Vitals, a set of specific speed and usability measurements that feed into your search ranking.

How Is Page Speed Measured?

Page speed is not a single number — it is a collection of measurements that describe different parts of the loading experience. The main ones you will hear about are:

  • Time to First Byte (TTFB): how long before your browser receives the first piece of data from the server. A slow TTFB usually points to hosting quality.
  • First Contentful Paint (FCP): how long before the first visible content — text or an image — appears on screen.
  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long before the biggest visible element — usually a hero image or headline — fully loads. This is one of Google's Core Web Vitals.
  • Total Blocking Time (TBT): how long the page is unresponsive to clicks and taps while loading. High TBT makes a site feel broken even if it looks like it has loaded.

You do not need to memorise these. What matters is knowing they exist and that tools like Google PageSpeed Insights will measure them for you and flag any that are causing problems.

How to Test Your Website's Speed for Free

Google PageSpeed Insights is the most useful free tool for this. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, enter your website address, and run the test. It will give your site a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop, with specific recommendations for what to fix.

Scores above 90 are considered good. Scores between 50 and 89 need improvement. Scores below 50 are poor and will likely be affecting both visitor experience and your Google ranking.

Run the test on your mobile score first — Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for ranking, so a slow mobile score matters more than a slow desktop score.

Most small business websites fail speed tests because of large, unoptimised images — a problem that is straightforward to fix once you know about it.

What Causes a Slow Website?

The most common causes of slow page speeds on small business websites are:

  • Oversized images. This is the number one culprit. A photograph taken on a modern phone can be 5–10 MB. A well-optimised web image should typically be under 200 KB. Uploading photos directly from your phone or camera without resizing and compressing them will slow your site significantly.
  • Too many third-party scripts. Every tool you add to your site — a live chat widget, a cookie consent platform, a booking system, social media share buttons, advertising trackers — adds extra code that must load before your page is fully ready. Each one adds a small delay; together they add up.
  • Cheap or shared hosting. Very inexpensive hosting puts your website on a server shared with hundreds or thousands of other sites. When those servers are busy, your site loads slowly. Better hosting — or static hosting on a platform like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare — eliminates this problem entirely.
  • Unminified code. Web pages are built from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These files can be compressed (minified) to make them smaller and faster to download. Many website builders do this automatically; hand-coded sites may need it done explicitly.
  • No caching. Caching means storing parts of your website locally on a visitor's device so they do not need to be downloaded again on the next visit. Without caching, every visit reloads everything from scratch.

What Should You Actually Do?

If you run your site through PageSpeed Insights and get a low score, here is where to start:

  • Fix your images first. Resize photos to the maximum width they will be displayed at on screen (usually 1200–1600 pixels wide) and save them as WebP or compressed JPEG. Free tools like Squoosh (squoosh.app) let you do this in a browser without any software. This single step typically has the biggest impact.
  • Remove scripts you do not use. If you have a live chat widget that nobody ever uses, or share buttons that visitors never click, remove them. Every third-party script you cut speeds up your site.
  • Consider your hosting. If your site is on very cheap shared hosting and speed is a priority, moving to a better hosting environment or a static hosting platform will make a noticeable difference. Static websites — which serve plain HTML files rather than dynamically generating pages — are consistently among the fastest on the internet.
  • Ask your developer. If you are not technical, share your PageSpeed Insights report with your web developer. The report highlights specific issues in plain language, and most speed improvements are straightforward for an experienced developer to fix.

Frequently asked

How fast does my website need to be?
Google considers a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) of under 2.5 seconds as good, between 2.5 and 4 seconds as needing improvement, and over 4 seconds as poor. For most small business websites, aiming for a PageSpeed Insights score of 90 or above on mobile is a realistic and worthwhile target. On a well-optimised static site, scores of 95–100 are achievable without specialist knowledge.
Does page speed affect SEO?
Yes, directly. Google uses Core Web Vitals — which are speed and usability measurements — as a ranking factor for all searches. Two sites with equally relevant content will not rank equally if one loads significantly faster than the other. Speed is not the only ranking factor, but it is one Google has been explicit about, and improving a very slow site can produce noticeable ranking improvements.
My website builder says it's optimised. Should I still test it?
Yes. Platform claims about optimisation are general — your specific site, with your specific images, fonts, and third-party tools installed, may perform very differently from the platform average. Always test your actual live website rather than relying on a platform's marketing. Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress sites vary enormously in real-world speed depending on the theme and tools used.
What is the difference between page speed and hosting speed?
Hosting speed — specifically Time to First Byte — is how quickly your server responds when someone requests your page. Page speed covers everything after that: how fast the browser downloads and displays your content. Both matter. You can have fast hosting but a slow page if your images are oversized. You can have a well-optimised page that still feels slow if your hosting responds sluggishly. Fixing images solves the page side; upgrading hosting solves the server side.

We use Google Analytics to understand how visitors use this site. No personal data is sold. Privacy policy.