Page speed is usually filed under "technical stuff" — but it's really a sales metric. Every extra second of load time costs you a slice of visitors before they've read a single word, and on mobile connections the effect is brutal. Here's why speed matters so much for landing pages, and how to actually achieve it.
The cost of a slow page
Research consistently shows that over half of mobile visitors abandon pages taking longer than about three seconds, and that each additional second shaves conversions by several percent. If you're paying for clicks, a slow page means you're literally paying for people to leave. A £2 click that bounces at the loading screen is £2 burned.
What slows landing pages down
Oversized images
The number-one culprit. A photo straight from a phone camera is 3–8MB; the same image properly sized and compressed is 100–200KB — 40 times smaller with no visible difference on screen.
Page-builder bloat
Drag-and-drop builders load entire frameworks, sliders, animation libraries and font packs whether your page uses them or not. A hand-built page typically weighs a tenth as much.
Third-party scripts
Chat widgets, social pixels, review carousels, heatmap tools — each adds requests and delay. Audit ruthlessly: if a script doesn't measurably earn its keep, remove it.
Web fonts by the dozen
Five font weights loaded from a remote service can block rendering. System fonts or one or two carefully chosen weights keep text instant.
Our speed checklist
- Every image resized to display dimensions and compressed; lazy loading below the fold.
- No sliders, no autoplay video heroes, no animation frameworks for decoration alone.
- Minimal third-party scripts, loaded deferred so they never block the page.
- Clean, hand-written CSS — one small stylesheet, not five framework bundles.
- Server-level compression and browser caching via .htaccess rules.
- Tested on a real mid-range phone over 4G, not just office fibre.
How to check your own page
Run your URL through Google's PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score, not desktop. The three Core Web Vitals to watch: LCP (largest content should load within 2.5s), INP (the page should respond quickly to taps), and CLS (content shouldn't jump around as it loads).
Speed is also an SEO input via Core Web Vitals, so a fast page ranks better and converts better — one of the few improvements with no trade-off.
Every page we build targets a sub-two-second load on mobile. If your current page is dragging, our conversion audit will tell you exactly what's slowing it down.
Want this handled for you?
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