Paradoxically, our computers, phones, and every device we use to go online get more powerful year after year, yet the internet continues to lag. Everywhere you look, ordinary static websites take 2–3 seconds to load, even on 5G. The amount of data they consume runs into double-digit megabytes. The actual payload of an average site consists merely of a few pages of text and a couple of dozen photos, and yet it loads as if downloading all four volumes of War and Peace five times over (and that’s no figure of speech: the four volumes altogether are just over 4 MB).
Clients of web agencies often don’t realise how important it is to invest time and money into ensuring the site they order is lightweight and takes the shortest possible time to load. Worse still, web agencies themselves often don’t realise it either.
“People are used to the internet being slow, ” a hotel director I know told me recently while we were discussing their website. “Three seconds is a normal wait for them. Of course, the faster the better, but that’s not the main point, is it?” I state with confidence: no, site speed is the second most important thing after content. If your simple website makes someone wait even just a couple of seconds for every request, it can and must be fixed.
Why?
Why a website needs to load fast
1. The overall feel
I reckon most of my readers know how frustrating slow internet is and how that irritation grows with every second spent waiting. Yes, the internet lags, and it lags mercilessly. As a business owner, would you want your competitors’ sites to lag while yours, by contrast, flies? I certainly would. Even if a visitor doesn’t realise what attracted them to a lightning-fast website, that speed will be registered subconsciously. It leaves them with a lingering sense that the site, unlike the rest of the internet, is not getting in their way. After that, they go to Facebook and shed a silent tear while waiting for the feed to load long enough to go and boil the kettle.
UX designers call this “the absence of friction”. The less friction there is between the site and the person who wants to read it, the better. And, crucially, the higher the conversion rate.
2. Core Web Vitals
Were it only about subjective user perception, things might be simpler. But your site also needs to rank high in search engines. Back in 2020, Google figured out how to measure your user’s suffering (or pleasure) objectively.
While indexing your site, the Google bot looks at three metrics:
- How quickly the largest piece of content appeared (LCP),
- Whether the content jumps around under your fingers while you’re trying to click a button (CLS),
- And how quickly the site responds to a click (INP).
Since May 2021, these measurements have been officially used for search ranking. Google also considers accessibility, server-side security, and SEO.
You can check your site’s performance right now using Google’s official tool. Anything not in the green zone most likely needs attention.
3. Edge cases
Imagine this: you’re driving abroad on a motorway, in a hurry (you need to reach the hotel before the reception closes), you’re running out of petrol, and you’ve only just noticed. Mobile data is roaming, hit-or-miss. Your passenger grabs their phone, looks at a map (the map takes thirty seconds to load), and sees a petrol station. To refuel, you need to exit the motorway in time; you can’t stop — it’s a major road, an authobahn, you name it.
Roaming is expensive; every megabyte costs as much as a litre of petrol, but let’s say you don’t care about the cost — you just need to know if the station is open. The map doesn’t show opening hours. But there is a website for the petrol station chain. The passenger goes to the site, swearing under their breath.
The site loads fonts (two types, three weights each), a kiloton of scripts (because it’s built on a modern framework that assumes it’s a “web app, ” not a site). All this time, you see a spinning loader. Then the site insists on loading the exact same map you just came from — meaning it has to request Google’s servers, and you’re on 3G roaming, slow and costly. By the time the passenger finds the opening hours in the footer a minute later, you’ve already missed the turning.
In short, you’ve consumed thirty megabytes of roaming data and ninety seconds of time, but you still haven’t refuelled. The problem isn’t just that “the internet is slow” — it’s that web developers pretend it isn’t.
Now, imagine you are the owner of that petrol station. You’ve just lost a customer.
What this blog is about and why it matters
We are dedicating the Cloud9 blog to fixing this situation — making sure your site stops lagging, even from a mountain train via a VPN. The simplest option is to trust us with it: we’ll help you stop losing customers due to poor performance. As for exactly what we’ll do, we’ll cover that in future posts. Stay tuned.
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