Page speed affects three things that matter directly to your business: how Google ranks your site, how many visitors convert to leads, and how much it costs you to run Google Ads.
Speed and rankings
Google uses Core Web Vitals — including Largest Contentful Paint, a direct measure of load speed — as a ranking factor. Sites that load fast earn a ranking advantage over slow sites with otherwise equal SEO signals.
Speed and conversion
Research consistently shows that page load time and conversion rate are inversely related. A site that takes 5 seconds to load can expect roughly half the conversion rate of a site that loads in under 2 seconds. For every lead your slow site generates, a fast competitor site would generate two.
Speed and Google Ads quality scores
Google assigns a Quality Score to your landing pages when you run ads. A low Quality Score means you pay more per click for the same position. Page speed is a component of Quality Score.
What makes sites slow
The most common culprits are uncompressed images, too many plugins (on WordPress), unused JavaScript, and cheap hosting. Image compression alone often produces the biggest improvement for the least effort.
How to measure and fix it
Use Google PageSpeed Insights (free) to audit your site. It tells you exactly what’s slowing you down, prioritized by impact. For WordPress sites, a combination of image compression, caching, and sometimes a CDN can bring most sites under 2 seconds.