How much is a slow website costing your prospect?

"Your site is slow" is a true statement that changes nobody's mind. "Your 5.2-second mobile load is costing you roughly $1,400–$3,600 a month" is the same fact, priced — and it gets fixed.

Here's how to get from the first sentence to the second, honestly.

Speed → drop-off → lost conversions

The chain is simple and each link is measurable:

1. Load time drives bounce. Slower first paint and time-to-interactive mean more visitors leave before they engage. The effect is sharpest on mobile, where most local-business traffic now lives.
2. Bounce is lost conversions. A visitor who left never filled the form, tapped call, or added to cart.
3. Lost conversions are lost revenue. Multiply by how often a conversion becomes a customer, and by what a customer is worth.

You don't need to invent any of these numbers. Load time is measured directly (Google's own Lighthouse / PageSpeed data). Conversion and close rates have well-documented industry benchmarks. Customer value, the owner usually knows within a range.

A worked example (with the assumptions visible)

Say a local service business gets 1,500 mobile visits/month, its pages take ~5.5s to become usable, and a booked job is worth ~$300.

• A site that loads in ~2s might convert visitors to inquiries at ~4%. At 5.5s, realistic benchmarks put that closer to ~2.5%.
• That 1.5-point gap on 1,500 visits ≈ ~22 fewer inquiries/month.
• If half of inquiries become jobs at $300 each, that's **$3,300/month** the speed problem is quietly costing.

Every number there is a benchmark or a stated assumption. Swap in the real ones and the range moves — that's the point of measuring rather than guessing.

Why ranges, not a single number

Anyone who hands you one exact figure without your analytics is guessing and hiding the guess. The honest output is a range with its inputs shown, so you can sanity-check it. A range you can interrogate is more persuasive than a precise number you can't.

What actually moves the number

Not a redesign. Usually a handful of specific, cheap fixes:

• Compress the oversized hero image and lazy-load below-the-fold media.
• Defer render-blocking scripts and third-party widgets.
• Stop the layout from shifting while it loads (that's what makes a page feel broken).

These are hours of work, not a rebuild — which is exactly why the ROI is high.

See your real number

The example above used benchmarks. Your site has real load times and a real conversion path. Measuring them is the difference between a directional estimate and a number you can take to the bank.

Run a free audit — it measures your actual speed with Google's own data and prices the drop-off it's costing you, with the math shown.