Website Speed Optimization: How Fast Should Your Site Load?

Website speed is not just a technical metric -- it directly affects your revenue. Amazon found that every 100 milliseconds of latency costs them 1% in sales. For small businesses, the impact is proportionally even larger because you have fewer visitors to lose.

Core Web Vitals: The Numbers That Matter

Google measures three Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly the main content loads. Target: under 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly the site responds to user interaction. Target: under 200 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much the page layout shifts during loading. Target: under 0.1.

What Slows Sites Down

The most common speed killers we see on Michigan business websites:

• Unoptimized images: A single uncompressed photo can be 5MB. Convert to WebP and resize appropriately.
• Too many plugins: WordPress sites with 30+ plugins load unnecessary code on every page.
• No caching: Without browser and server caching, every visit loads everything from scratch.
• Cheap hosting: Shared hosting with 500 other sites means slow response times.
• Render-blocking resources: CSS and JavaScript files that block the page from displaying.

Quick Wins for Speed

1. Compress images: Use WebP format and resize to actual display dimensions
2. Enable caching: Set browser cache headers for static assets
3. Minimize HTTP requests: Combine CSS files, defer non-critical JavaScript
4. Use a CDN: Serve assets from servers closer to your visitors
5. Upgrade hosting: Move from shared hosting to VPS or managed hosting

At AppWT, speed optimization is built into every site we deliver. We target sub-2-second load times because your visitors will not wait longer than that. Learn about our speed optimization services.