Here’s a stat that should keep you up at night: if your website takes more than three seconds to load, roughly half of your visitors will leave before they see a single word of your content. They won’t read your services page. They won’t look at your portfolio. They definitely won’t fill out your contact form.

They’re just gone.

The Three-Second Rule

Google has studied this extensively. Their research shows that as page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by 32%. Push that to five seconds and it jumps to 90%.

Think about your own behavior. When you tap a link on your phone and the screen just sits there spinning, how long do you wait? Most people give it about the time it takes to exhale once, then they hit the back button and try the next result.

Your potential customers are doing the same thing to your website right now.

Google Cares About Speed Too

In 2021, Google rolled out what they call Core Web Vitals — a set of metrics that measure how fast your site loads and how stable it feels while loading. These metrics directly affect where you show up in search results.

This isn’t a minor factor. Google has been moving toward speed as a ranking signal for over a decade, and they’ve only gotten more aggressive about it. A slow site doesn’t just lose the visitors who actually make it there — it loses the visitors who never find you in the first place because Google buried you on page two.

What Makes a Site Slow?

Most of the time, it comes down to a few common culprits:

Oversized images. That 4MB hero photo from your photographer looks gorgeous, but it takes forever to download on a phone over cellular data. Images should be properly compressed and served in modern formats like WebP.

Too many plugins and scripts. Every third-party widget, chat bubble, analytics tracker, and social media embed adds weight to your page. WordPress sites are notorious for this — install a few popular plugins and suddenly your site is loading 30 different JavaScript files.

Cheap hosting. Budget hosting plans pack hundreds of websites onto the same server. When your neighbor’s site gets a traffic spike, your site slows down too. You get what you pay for.

Bloated page builders. Drag-and-drop website builders generate enormous amounts of unnecessary code behind the scenes. What looks simple on your screen might be thousands of lines of tangled markup underneath.

Speed Converts

A fast website doesn’t just feel better — it directly impacts your bottom line. Study after study confirms it:

  • Walmart found that for every one second of improvement in load time, conversions increased by 2%.
  • Amazon calculated that a 100-millisecond delay in load time cost them 1% in sales.
  • The BBC discovered they lost 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.

You’re not Walmart or Amazon, but the principle scales down. If your site gets 500 visitors a month and 3% of them contact you, that’s 15 leads. Speed your site up and push that to 5%? That’s 25 leads from the same traffic. No extra marketing spend, no SEO tricks — just a faster site.

What “Fast” Actually Looks Like

A well-built site should load its main content in under 1.5 seconds. The largest visible element — usually your hero image or main heading — should appear within 2.5 seconds. And nothing on the page should jump around while it’s loading.

These aren’t aspirational numbers. They’re achievable with the right technology choices and a developer who prioritizes performance from the start rather than bolting it on after the fact.

The Firefly Software Approach

We build sites that are fast by default, not fast by accident. Our technology stack generates lean, static pages that load almost instantly — no database queries, no server-side processing, no bloated frameworks slowing things down.

The result is a site that loads in under a second on most connections. Your visitors stay, your search rankings improve, and more of those visitors become customers.

Want to see how your current site stacks up? Run it through Google PageSpeed Insights and see your score. Then get in touch — we’ll show you what’s possible.