How Slow Websites Kill Conversions (And What to Do About It)

The link between speed and revenue has been studied for two decades, and the results point the same way. Amazon engineers famously reported that every 100ms of added latency measurably cost sales. Google found that adding half a second to search page generation dropped traffic by 20%. A widely cited Aberdeen Group study put the cost of a 1-second delay at around 7% of conversions.

Treat these figures as directional rather than gospel — every site is different. But even directionally, the arithmetic is sobering: if the 7% figure held for a site taking £10,000 a month, a one-second slowdown would cost roughly £700 a month. Your exact number will differ; the direction won't.

Google's research with SOASTA in 2017 measured how bounce probability rises with load time: going from 1 second to 3 seconds increased the probability of bounce by 32%. At 5 seconds it was up 90%, and at 10 seconds, 123%.

Plenty of budget WordPress hosting delivers load times in the 2–4 second range under real-world load. That means a meaningful share of your visitors are leaving before they ever see your content, products, or services.

Around six in ten web visits now happen on mobile devices, where network conditions are less predictable and processing power is limited. A site that loads in 2 seconds on desktop can take 5–8 seconds on a mid-range phone over 4G.

Google's mobile-first indexing means your mobile performance directly impacts your search rankings. If your mobile site is slow, you're losing both visitors and search visibility.

You can spend weeks optimising code, compressing images, and configuring caching plugins — and sometimes you should. But if your hosting is the bottleneck, none of that work pays off. Slow, variable server response time puts a floor under every other optimisation.

What to look for: dedicated resources rather than a shared PHP pool, so your response times don't depend on strangers' traffic; monitoring, so you can see regressions instead of hearing about them from customers; and honest, fixed pricing, so a busy month doesn't become a billing surprise.

On G7Cloud every site gets its own dedicated container and per-minute uptime monitoring with alerts. And if the thing stopping you from moving is the move itself: our team does assisted migrations for free — we set up a preview of your migrated site first, and nothing cuts over until you approve it.