Site speed matters, but not the way most people think

Dear founder,

Every week someone sends me a red performance score in a panic, convinced it's the reason sales are flat. Usually it isn't the whole story — but speed does matter, and the way we talk about it is mostly wrong.

Chasing 100 is a trap

A perfect score on a testing tool is not the goal, and chasing it can cost you more than it returns. The tools test one page, once, in ideal conditions. Your customers are on real phones, on real networks, doing real things.

What actually matters is how it feels:

• Does the first thing appear quickly?
• Does the layout stop jumping around while it loads?
• Does the button respond the instant they tap it?

Those three questions map neatly onto Core Web Vitals, and they're what Google and your customers both reward.

Where the real weight lives

When a store is slow, the cause is almost always the same short list.

1. Huge images served far larger than they display
2. Too many apps each loading their own scripts
3. Third-party tags — chat, ads, analytics — piling up
4. A heavy theme doing work on every page it doesn't need

Speed isn't a score to win. It's the difference between a customer waiting and a customer leaving.

Fix the felt slowness first

Start with the things a shopper actually experiences on the pages that make you money — home, collection, product, cart. Compress the images, defer what isn't needed immediately, and question every tag.

A store that feels fast on a three-year-old Android phone will out-convert a store with a prettier score that stutters in the real world every time. If you want to know exactly what's dragging your key pages down, book advisory time and I'll map it out for you.