Why a slow website costs you bookings

People looking for a hotel on their phone don’t wait. If the page is slow, they go back to the results and try the next one, often without having seen a single photo. A slow website doesn’t show in the design: it shows in the bookings that never arrive.

What the data says

According to a Google study of mobile pages, when load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability that a visitor leaves without doing anything rises by 32%. From 1 to 5 seconds, it rises by 90%. Those are visits you had already won, lost at the door.

What gets measured

• The first thing that appears. The moment the visitor sees something on screen. If it takes too long, the site looks broken.
• The main image. When the largest thing on the page shows up, usually the header photo. Google calls it LCP and takes it into account for rankings.
• Nothing jumping around. If elements move while the page loads, visitors end up tapping where they didn’t mean to.
• That it responds. The time between tapping a button and something happening.

You can measure your site for free with PageSpeed Insights: paste the address and look at the mobile results, since that’s where people book.

What usually slows a site down

• Unoptimised photos. A photo straight from the camera weighs many times what the screen needs.
• Page builders and too many plugins. Each one adds code visitors download even when it isn’t used.
• Videos that download in full before they start playing.
• Third-party services: chats, maps, fonts and ad pixels that load before your content.

How I make it fast

On the websites I design from scratch, every image is served at the size of the screen asking for it and in the lightest format the browser accepts. Videos are short, silent clips that only download when they appear, and there are no page builders: only the code the page needs. Speed isn’t fixed at the end; it’s decided while designing.

In short

A fast website isn’t a technical whim: it’s the difference between people seeing your photos or not. If you’d like to know how fast yours is, tell me about the project and we’ll measure it together.