If your website takes more than three seconds to load, research suggests more than half your visitors will leave before they've seen a single word of your content. That's not a small problem — that's potential customers walking out the door before you've had a chance to say hello.
Page speed isn't just a technical concern. It's a business concern.
Google cares — a lot
Google has used page speed as a ranking factor since 2010, and it's only become more important since. With the introduction of Core Web Vitals, Google now measures not just how fast your page loads, but how quickly it becomes usable and how stable it is as it loads. Slow sites rank lower. It's that simple.
What actually slows websites down?
- Unoptimised images: A photo straight from a camera might be 5MB. Properly optimised for the web, the same image can be under 200KB with no visible quality difference.
- Too many plugins or scripts: Every third-party tool you add adds load time.
- Cheap hosting: A slow server means a slow site, regardless of how well optimised your code is.
- Bloated website builders: Some drag-and-drop platforms generate enormous amounts of code to create relatively simple layouts.
How fast is fast enough?
As a rough guide, aim for your main pages to load in under two seconds on a standard connection. Google's PageSpeed Insights tool (free, at pagespeed.web.dev) will give you a score and specific recommendations for your site.
What Flatout does differently
Speed is built into everything we do. We use modern image formats (WebP), lazy loading, clean hand-written code, and premium hosting. We don't use bloated website builders. The result is sites that load fast from day one.