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 part of our clients, typically large accounts with an e-commerce activity, it's the complete opposite! They only see the User Experience aspect, with the deeply 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 site. They are not wrong, obviously, 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. A fast site in terms of loading (FCP, LCP, Speed Index metrics...) and user interactions (TBT, INP metrics...) is essential for establishing a lasting presence in a competitive sector. It's a quality assurance, an invisible pre-sales service, or 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 problem has not been anticipated, the solution is to turn to specialists, and certainly not to a generalist web agency. We are promoting our own services here, but we regularly observe the following unfortunate fact: many agencies will tell you that they can handle speed issues and that they have the internal resources to intervene. Some of our prospects make this choice, and return to us a few months later with bitterness, less cash flow, and the desire to finally resolve 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 one (mobile PageSpeed Insights score of 100%), you will need to allocate a real budget. It is a project whose cost/benefit ratio is calculated, which is planned within an existing roadmap, and whose returns are multiple. Combined with careful SEO work, it's the assurance of meeting the expectations of your visitors, search engines, but also your partners, suppliers, etc. It's up to you to decide if, with these elements in mind, you want to be assisted to maximize your website's speed.
