Friday, seven in the evening. A couple are lying by their hotel pool, looking for somewhere to eat. They find your restaurant on Google Maps, like the photos and tap "Website". The screen stays white. One, two, three seconds. They go back and tap the next one.
You never find out. No review, no complaint, no phone call. A website that's slow on mobile doesn't throw an error: it loses customers quietly. And because it loads perfectly on the office computer with fibre, hardly anyone notices.
How long do people wait before leaving?
About three seconds. According to Google, more than half of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than that to load. And websites keep getting heavier: a typical mobile page today weighs several times what it did ten years ago, almost always because of things the customer doesn't need.
How much more does a fast website sell?
The clearest example was published by Google itself. Vodafone tested two versions of the same page, identical in design and content, except that one showed its main content 31% faster. They split visitors down the middle and measured. According to the case study Google published on web.dev, the faster version sold 8% more, and also brought in more leads and more baskets.
Same product, same price, same photos. The only thing that changed was how long it took to appear.
That said, the improvement has to show across the whole journey, not just the home page. Holiday apartments with a lightning-fast home page and a booking page that takes five seconds haven't fixed anything. Guests don't leave on the home page: they leave right before paying.
Does Google penalise slow websites?
Yes, but not the way people usually tell it. Speed counts towards ranking, although Google always puts the most relevant content first. A fast website that doesn't answer the search won't rank first; but when several similar pages compete for the same search, speed breaks the tie.
What are Core Web Vitals?
The three measurements Google uses to decide whether your website gives a good experience:
| Metric | What it measures | What Google considers "good" |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | How long the main content takes to appear | Under 2.5 seconds |
| INP | How long the page takes to react when you tap, say, "Book" | 200 milliseconds or less |
| CLS | Whether things jump around while the page loads | 0.1 or less |
Bear in mind: Google doesn't judge you on a test score you got in your office, but on real data from the people who visit your website in Chrome. If one in four visits comes in on poor coverage, that experience counts too.
What slows down a local business website?
For reference, a well-built local business home page can weigh under 1 MB and show its main content within those 2.5 seconds on an ordinary phone. This is what usually spoils it:
- Photos straight from the camera. A phone photo weighs between 3 and 6 MB; prepared for the web, around 150 KB, and it looks the same. Photos sell, as we explained in our post on food photography, but they don't need to weigh that much.
- The home page video. A few seconds of ambience usually takes up between 3 and 10 MB. On patchy coverage, it's the first thing that makes people wait.
- Plugins that pile up. Chat, pop-up, Instagram widget, translator, map, cookie banner. Each one adds a few hundred KB and a call to another server; together they can add a second or two.
- "All-purpose" templates. They load 1 or 2 MB of code for a hundred features when you use five.
- Cheap hosting. A slow server can take more than a second just to start responding; a good one does it in a few tenths.
None of this shows from the office. That's why so many businesses find out late, when they're already thinking about redesigning their website for other reasons.
Do you have to give up on striking design?
No. Animations, ambient video or full-screen photography are often what makes a website stand out, and a bland website doesn't sell either. The key is balancing design and performance:
- Spend where people look first and where your brand gets stronger: the home page, an animation that leads to the booking button.
- Save where the customer comes to act: booking, making an appointment, calling. There, every extra effect gets in the way.
- Adapt to the device: the video that shines on a computer can be a light image on mobile.
- Load the heavy stuff later: if what matters appears instantly and the effects come in afterwards, the website is fast and beautiful at once.
When in doubt, ask one question: does this help the customer decide or act? If yes, it stays and gets optimised. If it's pure decoration, it has to earn its weight.
How can you tell today if your website is slow?
- The tourist test. Turn off wifi, search for your business on Google Maps and tap "Website". Count until you can read something useful (the menu, the booking button, the phone number). If you get to three, there's a problem.
- The Google test. Paste your address into PageSpeed Insights and look at the first block, the one about your real users. If it fails the Core Web Vitals, that's how Google already has you on record.
Finding out whether there's a problem is easy. Fixing it (what stays, what gets compressed, what loads later, whether the foundations hold up) is another story.
It's Friday again, seven in the evening. Same couple, same sunbed. They tap on your website and within a second they've got the menu, the photos and the booking button in front of them. Two taps later, they have a table for nine. This time you do find out: a booking has just come in.
At GMB Horizon we do web design for businesses in Tenerife and across the Canary Islands, built to look good and load fast at the same time. If you'd like to know how yours looks on a real phone, get in touch and we'll take a look.