Loading speed is a conversion problem, not a technical one

Most teams I've worked with treat loading speed as a dev problem - something to worry about after design and product are done. That's backwards. It's a conversion problem, and probably the cheapest one to fix.

The numbers are hard to ignore

A two-second delay in page load time can increase bounce rates by up to 103%, according to Akamai's research. Google found that 53% of mobile visitors leave if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. These aren't edge cases. This is the majority of your mobile traffic walking away because your page was slow.

Amazon ran their own tests and found that every 100 milliseconds of improved load time increased revenue by 1%. At Amazon's scale that's billions. At a smaller scale, it's still probably your cheapest conversion optimization.

Google cares too

Page speed is a ranking factor in Google's algorithm. Faster site, higher rank, more traffic, more conversions. It compounds.

The tension with rich content

Here's the annoying part: the things that make a site look good and feel engaging (images, animations, video, interactive elements) are the same things that slow it down. You can't just strip everything out. The trick is being smart about how you load it.

Compress images. Use modern formats like WebP. Lazy-load anything below the fold. Minify your CSS and JavaScript. Use a CDN. Cache aggressively. None of this is new advice, but I'm still surprised how many sites skip the basics.

Google's PageSpeed Insights will tell you exactly what's wrong with your site. web.dev has good guides on fixing it.

Why this gets ignored

I think it's because speed improvements are invisible when they work. Nobody notices a fast page - they just notice a slow one. It doesn't feel like a feature, so it doesn't get prioritized. But the data is clear: fixing load times is often cheaper and more effective than redesigning your landing page or rewriting your copy.