Why load time decides whether you get customers

Load time is not a topic just for nerds. It decides whether a visitor waits or taps away. Google has treated it as a ranking factor for years and measures it with the so-called Core Web Vitals.

Check it yourself, for free

Google offers a testing tool at pagespeed.web.dev. Enter your address and look at the value for mobile devices, not just desktop. Most visitors come from a phone.

What makes sites slow

• Images in their original size: a photo from a phone easily has 4 megabytes. On a website, 100 to 200 kilobytes are enough.
• Too many scripts: chat widgets, social media embeds, tracking, fonts from external servers.
• Builder and plugin bloat: code that is loaded even though the page does not use it.
• Cheap hosting: the server already needs a second before it even answers.
• No caching: every request is calculated from scratch.

What helps

Shrink images and deliver them in modern formats like WebP. Load fonts from your own server. Do without every script that is not strictly necessary. Use a server or network that is close to your visitors. And build the site so that the content is already in the HTML instead of being loaded later via JavaScript.

How I handle it

My websites load no external scripts, the fonts are on the site's own server, images are limited on upload, and the pages are fully rendered on the server. That keeps them fast even with weak reception. How fast exactly, you can measure yourself with the Google tool above.

What a good value is

For the most important value, the "Largest Contentful Paint", the moment the largest visible content has loaded, Google considers 2.5 seconds or less as good. Anything over 4 seconds is considered poor. You can find these limits in the Core Web Vitals documentation on web.dev.

Frequently asked questions

Is it enough to shrink the images?

It is the biggest single lever, but not the only one. If the site also loads ten external scripts, it stays slow.

Does more expensive hosting help?

Only if the server was the bottleneck. For a lean site on a normal server, response time is usually not a problem. For bloated WordPress sites on cheap hosting, it is.

How fast are your sites?

You can measure that yourself: enter devosweb.de at pagespeed.web.dev. I deliberately do not give a number here, because values vary slightly with every measurement.