You have invested time and money in getting people to visit your website. But if your site loads slowly, you are throwing away that investment. A visitor will wait about three seconds for your website to load before abandoning it and visiting a competitor's site instead. For a Calgary business, every second of slowness directly translates to lost customers and lost revenue.
The impact is measurable. Research shows that a two-second delay in page load time increases bounce rate by 50%. A three-second delay increases it by 40%. If your website is loading in 6+ seconds — which is common for poorly optimized sites — you are losing the majority of potential customers before they ever see what you offer. They do not know your prices, your services, your reviews, or anything else that might convince them to hire you. They just left.
Beyond customer acquisition, website speed impacts SEO rankings. Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, so slow websites rank lower than fast ones for the same keywords. This means you are not only losing existing traffic to competitors, you are also losing potential traffic because you rank lower in search results. A slow Calgary website is losing customers on two fronts simultaneously.
Common culprits behind slow Calgary websites include unoptimized images, outdated plugins and themes, poor hosting, inefficient code, and bloated libraries. If your website was built five or more years ago, it is almost certainly slow by modern standards. Browsers, devices, and internet speeds have all improved, but websites from 2018 were never designed with today's standards in mind.
The fix does not necessarily require a complete redesign. Sometimes optimization of images, updating to a faster hosting provider, and removing unnecessary plugins can dramatically improve speed. However, if your website is fundamentally built on outdated technology, a redesign may be the better long-term investment. Your website is your 24/7 salesperson — it needs to perform at its best, and speed is one of the most critical performance metrics. A fast, responsive website converts visitors into customers at rates dramatically higher than a slow one.
