Dear website owners,
The internet was invented over 40 years ago, but for some reason a lot of it is still slow — and it's driving me slightly insane.
The internet came online in 1983 and the world has figured out a lot since then — we have humanoid robots that can do back flips and reuseable mega-rockets, plus nearly every device in your home can stream Taylor Swift at your literal voice command. We're living in future. But for some reason, slow websites still exist. For some reason, some businesses think it's fine for us to stare blankly at the white screen that is their website loading while we feel our brains slowly going numb.
We put a human on the moon in 1969. I promise it's not that hard to make a website load in under 2 seconds.
And even crazier, this actually matters! Businesses lose money every year from having slow websites. I say this because every year there are studies clearly showing that having a slow website equals less people using it which equals less customers. Fun fact, a study found the standard online shopping customer expects a page will load in under 2 seconds, with 40% of people abandoning the site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load (reference). And this isn't new, that study is from 2009! Now, over 15 years later, there are still slow websites that fail to meet this.
And I know this all sounds overly dramatic, but I promise it's not. Let me give you some real slow-as-can-be websites I've dealt with earlier today:
- The main marketing firm we use? Their site takes 3 seconds to show something on the screen and another 7 seconds to finish loading.
- The college I went to? Blank screen for around 5 seconds and then another 20 seconds for the page to fully load. What's even worse, the last thing that loads is the top part of the page — you know, the part you see when you open it.
- My healthcare provider? It taking half a minute for their patient login page to load. Sometimes I forget to login because I started doing other things while waiting.
I promise it doesn't have to be this way. Please.
There are free tools that let you measure your website performance — like PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev). There are products out there to help make your website load faster everywhere in the world — like Cloudflare (my personal favorite) or Fastly, not to mention those offered by big cloud companies like AWS, GCP, or Azure. There are even service businesses that will gladly help you with this without costing a crazy amount of money or time — I say this with confidence because I work at one of them.
If you're reading this then you're on our blog, which should have loaded in around half a second if you're on a desktop or a full second if you're on a phone. Your website could do that too. Trust me when I say it's not rocket science or heart surgery or rocket surgery or anything nearly that complicated. So please, make your slow website faster, I'm begging you.
Sincerely,
Ferris Ellis
CEO & Founder
Urban Dynamics
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PS - I think this issue has actually been getting worse. I've struggled to find concrete data, but my gut feeling is that the experience of a “slow web page” has been continuously getting slower each year. I can't remember ever waiting half a minute for a web page in 2009. And here, in 2025, I now regularly wait that long.