Page speed affects both rankings and conversions. Here's how the two connect, and what usually slows a site down.
Website speed rarely gets the attention it deserves because it fails quietly — nobody complains about a slow site, they just leave. By the time a business notices a drop in enquiries, the cause is often sitting in page load time that's crept up unnoticed.
Search engines factor loading experience into how pages rank, particularly on mobile. Two sites with similar content can rank differently largely because one loads noticeably faster than the other.
Even visitors who do land on a slow page tend to abandon it before it finishes loading, especially on mobile connections. That's an enquiry or a sale that never had a chance to happen, and it doesn't show up anywhere except a slowly declining conversion rate.
In our audits, the same handful of culprits show up repeatedly: unoptimised images, too many third-party scripts (chat widgets, tracking pixels, embeds) loaded all at once, and hosting that wasn't sized for the traffic the site now gets.
Most speed problems are fixable without a full redesign — compressing and resizing images, deferring non-essential scripts, and moving to hosting that matches actual traffic usually gets a site back to a healthy load time within days, not months.
We treat speed as a standing part of both our web and IT work, not a one-time fix — because the scripts and images that slow a site down tend to creep back in every time new content gets added.