In our daily work as a web performance agency, prospects and clients contact us every day to audit and optimize their websites. The initial conversations are usually of the type "my site is slow, I want it to be faster". This is true regardless of their industry: e-commerce, publishers, or specialized brands all face the same issue of slowness, with the desire to offer visitors a fast-loading site.
When we dig deeper to better understand their issues, motivations, and goals, we find that they are quite different profiles.
Why is a fast website important?
In the eyes of a majority of web publishers, generally small and medium-sized, a site's loading speed is primarily a matter of SEO. Their primary and often sole motivation is simple: gain visibility in Google's search results pages (the famous SERPs). While web performance and SEO are intimately linked through the Page Experience aspect and Core Web Vitals, they thus overlook a whole part of the potential of performance optimization.
For another portion of our clients, typically large corporations with an e-commerce business, it's the complete opposite! They only see the User Experience aspect, with the ingrained idea that reduced loading times will improve their commercial performance. Conversion rates, average session duration, average order value, and revenue are, in their eyes, all related to having a fast website. They are not wrong, of course, but they also wear blinders specific to their profession.
The truth is that a fast website is an issue for SEO, UX, but much more than that. A fast website in terms of loading (FCP, LCP, Speed Index metrics...) and user interactions (TBT, FID, INP metrics...) is essential for long-term anchoring in a competitive sector. It's a quality assurance, an invisible pre-sales service, or even the best vector for your brand image. You take care of your visitors, and rest assured: they will notice!
Is your site as fast as your visitors expect?
How can we have a fast website?
Having a high-performing website isn't something everyone can do. The best way to avoid mistakes is to integrate speed considerations from the design of your site. By being proactive with specifications that mention web performance, you'll at least have the assurance that the issue hasn't been completely ignored. Because, sadly, a large majority of web design agencies still know nothing about what web performance is, let alone the tricks of the trade.
If the issue hasn't been anticipated, the solution is to turn to specialists, and definitely not to a generalist web agency. We're preaching to the choir here, but we regularly observe the following unfortunate reality: many agencies will tell you they can handle speed issues and have the in-house resources to intervene. Some of our prospects make this choice, and come back to us a few months later, not without bitterness, with less cash and a desire to finally fix their site's slowness.
Transforming a slow site into a fast one requires advanced skills, front-end developer experience, and an excellent understanding of how web browsers work. These are all qualities our teams possess, and that we make available to you as part of our performance optimization services.
What is the cost of a fast website?
As you've understood, whether for a new build/redesign or for optimizing an existing site, web performance is a matter for specialists. Specialists mean high added value, and high added value necessarily means cost/budget. Assume that if a freelancer or agency gives you a commercial proposal for a few hundred euros, there's a strong chance it's too good to be true. At Agence Web Performance, like other recognized specialists, we use rates based on the daily rate of a senior consultant (around €900-1000/day).
To create or transform an existing site into a fast site (mobile Page Speed Insights score of 100%), you will need to allocate a real budget for it. This is a project where the cost/benefit ratio is calculated, which is planned within an existing roadmap, and which has multiple benefits. Combined with careful SEO work, it ensures that you meet the expectations of your visitors, search engines, as well as your partners, suppliers, etc. It's up to you to decide if, with these elements in mind, you want to get support to maximize your website's speed.
