Performance
Why Website Performance Is Your Best Marketing Investment
Mike Lewis · · updated
A slow site quietly loses customers who never tell you they left. Here is what actually makes a difference.
Website speed affects revenue in a way that is hard to see, because the people it costs you never fill in a form to complain. They simply leave, and you never learn they were there. Google has confirmed page speed is a ranking factor, and visitors abandon sites that make them wait.
The performance checklist
- Optimise images with modern formats such as WebP and AVIF
- Lazy load anything below the fold, and nothing above it
- Keep the JavaScript bundle small, and check what is actually in it
- Use a CDN so distance stops being a factor
- Enable HTTP/2 and compression
Beyond speed: Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals measure real experience rather than a lab score: loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. The last one is the most often ignored and the most irritating to be on the wrong end of, because it is what makes a button move just as someone taps it.
The mistake we see most
A site can serve its content perfectly and still feel slow, because the content arrives hidden and waits for JavaScript to reveal it. Animation libraries do this by default: the text is in the response, styled to be invisible until a script runs. The page is technically fast and practically blank, and no amount of image optimisation will fix it.
Check by disabling JavaScript and loading your own site. Whatever remains is what a slow connection sees first, and what anything that does not run scripts sees at all.
Performance is not a one-time fix. It is a practice. A site gets slower on its own, one plugin and one tracking script at a time, so the audit matters more than the launch.