Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google confirmed page speed is a ranking factor. For Singapore businesses, slow websites cost you both customers and visibility.
The Impact of Speed on Business
The numbers are stark:
- 53% of mobile visitors leave if a page takes over 3 seconds to load
- 1 second delay reduces conversions by 7%
- 79% of shoppers dissatisfied with site performance are less likely to buy again
- Google penalizes slow sites in search rankings
Speed isn't a technical vanity metric - it directly affects your revenue.
Common Speed Killers
- Unoptimized images - Uploading 5MB photos when 200KB would look identical. This is the #1 issue.
- Too many plugins - Each WordPress plugin adds code. More code = slower loading.
- Cheap hosting - Budget hosting often means shared resources with hundreds of other sites.
- No caching - Making the server rebuild pages from scratch for every visitor.
- External scripts - Chat widgets, analytics, fonts, each makes additional network requests.
- Bloated code - Page builders often generate messy, inefficient code.
Quick Wins for Faster Loading
Start with these improvements:
- Compress images - Use TinyPNG or similar. Can reduce image size by 70% with no visible quality loss.
- Enable caching - Browser caching stores files locally, speeding up repeat visits.
- Use a CDN - Content Delivery Networks serve files from locations closer to your visitors.
- Minify code - Remove unnecessary characters from CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
- Lazy load images - Only load images as visitors scroll to them.
- Upgrade hosting - Good hosting costs $10-30/month. Cheap hosting costs you customers.
Test your speed: Use Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to see where you stand.
Site speed is a competitive advantage. While your competitors' pages load slowly, yours can be near-instant. Invest in speed optimization - the ROI is immediate and measurable.