Why Website Speed Matters for Your Business

Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google confirmed page speed is a ranking factor. For Singapore businesses, slow websites cost you both customers and visibility.

The Impact of Speed on Business

The numbers are stark:

• 53% of mobile visitors leave if a page takes over 3 seconds to load
• 1 second delay reduces conversions by 7%
• 79% of shoppers dissatisfied with site performance are less likely to buy again
• Google penalizes slow sites in search rankings

Speed isn't a technical vanity metric - it directly affects your revenue.

Common Speed Killers

• Unoptimized images - Uploading 5MB photos when 200KB would look identical. This is the #1 issue.
• Too many plugins - Each WordPress plugin adds code. More code = slower loading.
• Cheap hosting - Budget hosting often means shared resources with hundreds of other sites.
• No caching - Making the server rebuild pages from scratch for every visitor.
• External scripts - Chat widgets, analytics, fonts, each makes additional network requests.
• Bloated code - Page builders often generate messy, inefficient code.

Quick Wins for Faster Loading

Start with these improvements:

• Compress images - Use TinyPNG or similar. Can reduce image size by 70% with no visible quality loss.
• Enable caching - Browser caching stores files locally, speeding up repeat visits.
• Use a CDN - Content Delivery Networks serve files from locations closer to your visitors.
• Minify code - Remove unnecessary characters from CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
• Lazy load images - Only load images as visitors scroll to them.
• Upgrade hosting - Good hosting costs $10-30/month. Cheap hosting costs you customers.

Test your speed: Use Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to see where you stand.

Site speed is a competitive advantage. While your competitors' pages load slowly, yours can be near-instant. Invest in speed optimization - the ROI is immediate and measurable.