Performance
The real cost of a slow website (in dollars, per month)
A 4-second mobile load is invisible to you and devastating to your conversion rate. Here’s how to put a dollar figure on it — and why fixing it is usually a one-day job.
If your homepage loads in four seconds on 4G, and a competitor loads in one, you’re losing somewhere between 20% and 40% of your potential leads. The cost is silent — most owners never see the bounce, because the visitor never arrived.
The math
Take a small service business with 1,000 organic visitors a month and a 3% baseline conversion rate. That’s 30 enquiries. Speed studies (Google, SOASTA, Cloudflare) consistently show conversion drops 7% per additional second of load time on mobile.
Move from 4 seconds to 1 second and you recover roughly 21% of your conversion: 30 enquiries become 36. If your average closed enquiry is worth $400, that’s $2,400/month — about $29,000 a year — for one technical fix.
Why most sites are slow
- Hero images uploaded at 4MB instead of 200KB.
- Render-blocking JavaScript in the head.
- Hosted on a generic shared server in the wrong country.
- Web font sprawl (six families, one used).
- Animation libraries imported globally, used on one button.
How fast is fast enough
The honest target is sub-1.5s LCP on a 4G phone. Lighthouse 90+ is a leading indicator, not the goal. The goal is that the visitor stops noticing they’re waiting.
What we do by default
- Cloudflare Pages hosting — global edge, no shared-server lottery.
- Image optimisation as a build step (AVIF + WebP fallbacks, responsive sizes).
- One web font family, two weights max, swap not block.
- Server-side render where it counts; client-side only where interactivity demands it.
- JS bundle budget: under 100KB compressed for the first paint.