How fast does a website need to be?
Two numbers decide it, and you can check both yourself in two minutes.
Two and a half seconds
That is the longest the largest piece of content may take to appear for Google to rate the page as good. The measure is called Largest Contentful Paint. Above it the page counts as needing improvement, and load time is among the signals Google uses to weigh comparable pages against each other.
Fifty-three per cent
That many mobile visits are abandoned when loading takes longer than three seconds. The figure comes from Google's own study. Those people never see what you offer and never appear in any statistic as a lost customer.
Where it is measured
Not on your office machine on fibre, but on a mid-range phone on a mobile network. That is where somebody decides whether to wait. Open Google PageSpeed Insights, enter your address, and look at the mobile column.
What makes a page slow
Almost always the same four things: uncompressed images, fonts from someone else's server, scripts for analytics and chat, and a system that rebuilds every page on every request. None of them is unavoidable.
What a good number is worth
Speed sells nothing. It makes sure the people arrive who would otherwise turn away before the first sentence. Which is why the number is not a promise at the top of our site but a proof where it belongs.