The Number Most Business Owners Do Not Know
53% of mobile users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. More than half. Gone before they have seen a single thing about your business.
And it gets worse: Google uses page speed as a ranking factor. A slow site does not just lose visitors — it loses rankings, which means fewer visitors in the first place.
What Slow Actually Means
Go to pagespeed.web.dev right now and run your website. Google will give you a score from 0 to 100.
- 90–100: Fast. Your site is not losing customers to speed.
- 50–89: Needs improvement. You are losing some visitors.
- 0–49: Slow. You are actively damaging your business.
Most small business websites score in the 30–60 range on mobile. That means they are failing more than half the people who visit them on a phone.
Why WordPress Sites Get Slow
WordPress is the most common culprit. Not because WordPress is bad — it powers 40% of the internet — but because it is easy to make slow.
- Too many plugins, each adding load time
- Cheap shared hosting that cannot handle traffic
- Unoptimized images loading at full resolution
- Themes bloated with features you are not using
- No caching or CDN configuration
A WordPress site built carelessly on shared hosting can score under 30 on mobile PageSpeed. The same site, properly optimized on good hosting, can score 80+.
Why Next.js Sites Are Fast By Default
Next.js is fast by design. Pages are pre-built and served from a CDN, meaning there is no database query or server processing on each page load. Images are automatically optimized. JavaScript is split so only what is needed loads first.
The sites we build at Vizantir typically score 85–100 on desktop and 65–85 on mobile — significantly above the industry average.
The Three Metrics That Matter
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long until the main content is visible. Should be under 2.5 seconds.
Total Blocking Time (TBT): How long the page is unresponsive to user input. Should be under 200ms.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much the page jumps around while loading. Should be under 0.1.
These include two Core Web Vitals (LCP and CLS) plus Total Blocking Time, which Lighthouse uses in lab tests. They are central to PageSpeed scores and how Google evaluates page experience.
What To Do About It
If your site scores below 70 on mobile PageSpeed, here is where to start:
- Compress and resize all images
- Upgrade your hosting to a managed provider or Vercel
- Audit your plugins and remove anything unnecessary
- Enable caching
- Consider whether a platform migration makes sense
If you have done all of that and your scores are still poor, the problem is likely architectural — and a rebuild on a modern stack is probably the right answer.
Get a Free Performance Audit
We run free performance and conversion reviews for business websites. Book a strategy call and we will show you your scores, what is causing them, and what it would take to fix them.