Why Your Website Speed Matters More Than You Think
We recently rebuilt our own website from scratch. Not because the old one was broken, but because we wanted to prove something: a website can load in under a second. In fact, ours loads in 1.6 milliseconds.
Before you dismiss this as technical navel-gazing, let us show you why this matters for your business.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Every second your website takes to load costs you money. This isn't opinion—it's backed by research from Google, Amazon, and countless studies:
| Load Time | Bounce Rate | Conversion Rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1 second | 7% | 39% |
| 3 seconds | 11% | ~15% |
| 5 seconds | 38% | 0.6% |
That's not a typo. Sites loading in 1 second convert at 39%. At 5 seconds? Just 0.6%. That's a 65x difference in sales effectiveness.
What Most Agencies Won't Tell You
Most web agencies use WordPress or similar platforms because they're fast to develop—not because they're fast for your customers. The average WordPress site takes 2.5-3 seconds on desktop and over 13 seconds on mobile.
They'll tell you to add a caching plugin. Then a CDN. Then an image optimizer. Pretty soon you're paying for a dozen services to make a slow platform slightly less slow.
"We don't build fast sites. We build sites that are fast by design."
What We Did Differently
For our website, we took a different approach:
1. We wrote it in Rust. Not because it's trendy, but because Rust web servers handle 26,000-58,000 requests per second on basic hardware. WordPress handles about 30.
2. We optimized every image. Modern WebP format reduced our images from 20MB to 4.3MB—a 78% reduction—with no visible quality loss.
3. We eliminated unnecessary requests. Our entire site—HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and all images—loads from a single 19MB binary. No database queries. No file system access. Everything served from memory.
The result?
Does Every Business Need This?
Honestly? No. If you're a local bakery with 50 visitors a day, WordPress is fine.
But if you're:
- Running paid advertising (every second costs you ad spend)
- Competing for SEO rankings (Google uses speed as a ranking factor)
- Selling anything online (speed directly impacts conversions)
- Building your brand (slow sites feel unprofessional)
...then website speed isn't a nice-to-have. It's competitive advantage.
The Good News
You don't need to rebuild everything from scratch. Often, the biggest wins come from:
Image optimization — Converting to modern formats can cut load times by 50% alone.
CDN setup — Cloudflare's free tier can dramatically improve performance for global visitors.
Removing bloat — That carousel plugin you never use? It's still loading JavaScript on every page view.
We can audit your current site and show you exactly where the bottlenecks are—often with fixes that take hours, not weeks.
Ready to Speed Up Your Website?
Get a free performance audit. We'll analyze your site, identify the bottlenecks, and give you a clear plan to fix them.
Get Your Free AuditWant the Technical Details?
For developers and technical decision-makers, we've published a comprehensive white paper documenting our entire optimization process, including benchmark data, code samples, and architecture decisions.
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