Website Speed Matters: Why Slow Sites Lose Patients

Google's 2016 mobile research found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Open your website on your phone, using cellular data and not WiFi, and count. If the screen is still blank or half drawn at three seconds, that is what your patients see.

Speed also affects how often you are found. Google has said that page speed is a ranking factor, and it measures speed on real visitors' phones. Walmart reported in 2012 that each second it cut from page load time raised conversions by 2%.

How Google measures speed

Three numbers make up what Google calls Core Web Vitals.

• Main content appears. How long until the biggest thing on the screen, usually your top photo or headline, shows up. The target is under 2.5 seconds.
• Response to a tap. How quickly the page reacts when someone taps a button. The target is under 200 milliseconds.
• Jumping around. How much the page shifts while it loads, like text that moves just as you go to tap it. The target is under 0.1.

What usually makes a dental site slow

• Large photos. A top photo straight from a camera or a stock site can be several megabytes. Photos should be saved at the size they appear on screen, in a modern format such as WebP, and photos far down the page should load only when someone scrolls to them.
• Too many add-ons. Chat boxes, review widgets, social feeds, video embeds, tracking tools and cookie banners each load their own code. Keep the ones you use and remove the rest. When did you last look at your Facebook tracking data?
• Plugin-heavy WordPress sites. Every plugin adds code that loads on every page, and some plugins exist only to fix the slowness caused by the others.
• Cheap shared hosting. Your site shares one server with many others, and gets slower at busy times.

How to measure it

Go to pagespeed.web.dev, enter your address and read the mobile score.

My target for a new site is 90 or higher on mobile, and I rebuild a site free if it scores under 90. GTmetrix shows a more detailed breakdown of what loads and when, if you want to dig further.

What you can fix this week

1. Shrink the photos. Squoosh is free and runs in your browser. Resize each photo to the size it shows at and save it as WebP.
2. Delete unused plugins. The slider from three years ago, the share buttons nobody uses.
3. Turn on caching if your host offers it, so returning visitors do not download everything again.
4. Delay the extras. Many chat boxes and trackers can be set to load after the main page.
5. Look at your hosting. If you are on the cheapest shared plan, a better one or a different kind of hosting may help.

Tune it or rebuild it

If your site is fairly new and well built, tuning may be enough. If it is a heavy old WordPress theme with a pile of plugins, scores under 40, or looks bad on a phone, you will probably spend more time patching it than a rebuild would take.

If you want me to look at yours, run the free audit or book a call. Sites start at $997 to set up and $79 a month.