Every second your website takes to load costs you money. This isn’t opinion — it’s backed by data across multiple industries. Research shows that as page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of a visitor leaving increases by 32%. From 1 to 5 seconds, it jumps to 90%.
For businesses that depend on their website for leads and sales, speed is revenue infrastructure.
Studies have found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed can increase conversions by 8-10% depending on the industry. Major retailers have calculated that every 100ms of latency costs roughly 1% in sales. These are not marginal differences — they’re the gap between profitable and unprofitable digital channels.
Since 2021, Google has used Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. Three metrics measure real user experience:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — How long until the largest visible element loads. Target: under 2.5 seconds. Usually your hero image or main heading. Slow servers, unoptimised images, and render-blocking CSS are the typical culprits.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — How quickly the page responds to user interaction. Target: under 200ms. Heavy JavaScript, third-party scripts, and unoptimised event handlers cause sluggish interactions.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — How much the page jumps around during loading. Target: under 0.1. Images without dimensions, dynamically injected content, and web fonts that cause reflow are common offenders.
Understanding these metrics is part of what makes a good SEO partner — they should understand technical performance, not just keywords.
Shared hosting. Most budget hosting plans put your site on a server shared with hundreds of others. When another site spikes, yours slows down. This is why we built Orion Web Service — dedicated resources that aren’t affected by your neighbours.
Unoptimised images. A single 5MB hero image can double your page load time. Modern formats like AVIF and WebP, combined with responsive sizing and lazy loading, reduce image payload by 80% without visible quality loss.
Plugin bloat. WordPress sites are notorious for this. Every plugin adds CSS and JavaScript to every page — even pages where the plugin isn’t used. Auditing and removing unnecessary plugins can dramatically improve performance. This is one of the hosting mistakes we see constantly.
No CDN. Without a Content Delivery Network, every visitor loads your site from a single server location. A CDN serves content from the edge location nearest to each visitor, cutting latency significantly.
Render-blocking resources. CSS and JavaScript files that load synchronously in the <head> block rendering until they’re fully downloaded. Deferring non-critical scripts and inlining critical CSS fixes this.
Let’s make this concrete. Say your website gets 10,000 visitors per month with a 2% conversion rate and an average customer value of $500. That’s $100,000/month. An 8% improvement from a speed optimisation effort would generate an additional $8,000 monthly — $96,000 per year.
Compare that to the cost of proper website optimisation and dedicated hosting. The ROI is not even close.
The starting point is understanding where you stand. Our free website audit uses Google’s PageSpeed Insights API to measure your real Core Web Vitals scores and identify the specific bottlenecks.
Quick wins that often produce immediate results:
For businesses serious about performance, a comprehensive website rebuild on modern infrastructure often delivers better results than trying to optimise a fundamentally outdated platform.
Google has made it explicit: page experience is a ranking factor. A fast site doesn’t just convert better — it ranks higher, which brings more traffic, which generates more revenue. Speed creates a virtuous cycle.
This is why our approach integrates web design, hosting, and SEO. Speed is not just a developer problem or a hosting problem — it’s a business problem that requires coordinated solutions.
How fast is your site? Run a free audit and see your Core Web Vitals scores instantly. Or get a hosting quote to move to dedicated infrastructure.