What Speed Is Worth to a Small Business

Where the statistics come from

The figures quoted about speed and conversion come almost entirely from very large retailers.

A percentage improvement in conversion is enormous when applied to millions of visits and is a rounding error at forty a day.

Those businesses also compete on a different axis: their visitors have alternatives one tap away and no relationship with them.

So the numbers are real and they describe a situation that is not yours.

Do the arithmetic on your own figures

Which takes two minutes and settles most of this.

Take your monthly visits, your enquiry rate, and the value of a job.

Apply a plausible improvement, and be generous: say a tenth more enquiries.

For many small businesses that is one additional enquiry a month, and perhaps one additional job a quarter.

Whether that justifies a day of work or a thousand dollars depends entirely on what a job is worth, which is why the answer differs so much between businesses.

A trade with four thousand dollar jobs and a shop with thirty dollar orders should reach opposite conclusions from the same speed improvement.

Where speed genuinely costs you

• Above about five seconds, people leave.
• A blank screen reads as broken.
• Paid clicks you have already bought.
• Mobile arrivals from search.
• Anything with a form or a checkout.

The third is the case where the arithmetic changes completely. A slow landing page wastes money you have already spent, so the same improvement is worth considerably more where advertising is involved.

The shape of the return

Which is not linear and is the useful thing to understand.

Going from nine seconds to four is transformative, because at nine a substantial share of visitors never see the page at all.

Going from four to two is worth having and considerably less dramatic.

Going from two to one and a half is imperceptible to a human being.

So the return concentrates almost entirely at the bad end, and a site already at two seconds has spent the available benefit.

Which means the honest advice for most businesses is to check whether they are at the bad end, and if not, stop.

A worked example

A business was quoted a substantial sum for performance work on a site loading in about two and a half seconds.

Their traffic was around nine hundred visits a month, converting at about four per cent, with jobs worth several hundred dollars.

A generous estimate of the improvement was a tenth more enquiries, which was three or four a month.

At their conversion from enquiry to job that was perhaps one additional job a month, which did justify the work.

A second business with the same site speed and eighty visits a month reached the opposite conclusion from the same calculation.

The site was not the variable, the traffic and the job value were.

The reasons that are not conversion

Worth including, since they are frequently the better argument.

Search visibility, where speed is a factor among many and a genuinely slow site is disadvantaged.

Reputation, since a slow site reads as a business that does not attend to things.

Your own time, since a slow administration side costs whoever updates the site every week.

And cost, where a heavy site on shared hosting eventually forces an upgrade that a lighter one would not.

Those are real and none of them is the percentage improvement people quote.

The cheap fixes are always worth it

Since the argument above is about how much to spend rather than whether to bother.

Enabling compression, sizing images correctly, removing tools nobody uses, and setting fonts not to block are all cheap or free.

Those together take most sites from bad to acceptable and cost a day at most.

It is the work beyond that, the last second, that requires the arithmetic.

So the recommendation is do the free things always, and calculate before paying for anything more.

What to say when somebody quotes a statistic

Since this comes up in sales conversations.

Ask what traffic and order values the figure was derived from, which is a fair question and usually unanswerable.

Then apply the proposed improvement to your own numbers and see what it produces.

Where the answer is a job a quarter and the quote is a month's revenue, that is a straightforward decision.

Where it is a job a month, it may be the best money available.

The calculation is the same either way and almost nobody does it.

Slow is not usually your biggest problem

Worth placing this alongside the alternatives, since the money has other uses.

A site loading in three seconds with no prices, no reviews, and a form asking eleven questions has three larger problems than its speed.

Those cost enquiries at every stage rather than only at arrival, and each is cheaper to fix than a second of load time.

Where a supplier proposes performance work, ask what else they would do with the same budget and listen to whether the answer is honest.

Speed is the most measurable improvement available, which is why it is proposed more often than its return justifies.

The counter-case

Underinvesting is also possible.

A genuinely slow site loses visitors before they see anything, and those losses do not appear in any figure you have, since the person never arrived.

Speed also compounds with everything else, so a fast site makes every other improvement work better.

And the arithmetic above is conservative by design, which means it will sometimes talk you out of something worth doing.

Do the free fixes, check whether you are above five seconds, and calculate before paying for the last second.

The calculation

1. Take your monthly visits.
2. Take your enquiry rate.
3. Add a tenth as a generous improvement.
4. Convert to jobs at your usual rate.
5. Multiply by job value.
6. Compare against the quote.
7. Do the free fixes regardless.

Step five is where businesses reach opposite conclusions from identical sites, since job value varies more between businesses than page speed ever does.

The general version of this calculation is covered in the return on a website calculated honestly.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.