We've all experienced this frustration: clicking on a link to discover a restaurant's menu, and waiting 5, 6, 7 seconds facing a white screen before leaving. On the internet, patience is non-existent. For a local business, the speed of your website is just as important as the quality of your services.
The 3-second rule
Statistics show that over 50% of mobile users abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. If your site is slow, you are literally giving away your customers to your competitors whose sites load faster.
Google hates slow sites
Google wants to offer the best experience to its users. If its algorithm detects that your site is slow, it will penalize you in search results (SEO). You will appear lower, or not at all, on queries like "restaurant nearby" or "florist Paris".
Why is a site slow?
- Images that are too large or unoptimized.
- Use of heavy "Website Builders" (like Wix or Elementor on WordPress) that load thousands of lines of useless code.
- Cheap and unoptimized hosting.
This is exactly why I code my clients' sites "by hand" using modern technologies, guaranteeing a Google performance score of 100/100.
How to test and improve your site's speed?
The best free tool to evaluate your site's performance is Google PageSpeed Insights. It gives you a score out of 100 for mobile and desktop versions. If your score is below 50 on mobile, there is an emergency. The main causes of slowdowns are generally overly heavy images (uncompressed or in obsolete formats), low-end overloaded shared hosting, or the accumulation of useless plugins on platforms like WordPress. A professional web developer optimizes every line of code and uses next-generation image formats (like WebP or AVIF) to ensure almost instant loading, thereby offering the best possible experience to your visitors and reassuring Google about the technical quality of your platform.