Why your website's load time matters

How long others keep you waiting

Every year millions of websites are measured, most recently in July 2025. Line up all the measured websites from fastest to slowest, and in the middle sits a website where you wait 4.7 seconds on a phone before you see anything. One half is faster, the other half slower. On a computer this middle website sits at 2.2 seconds. For the slowest quarter you wait more than 8.5 seconds on a phone.

This was measured with Google's own test, which anyone can run for free. It pretends you are on a mid-range phone on the train. On wifi at home everything is faster, the test deliberately assumes everyday conditions.

Where Google draws the line

Google calls a website fast when you see something within 2.5 seconds on 3 out of 4 visits. From 4 seconds it counts as slow. Among real visitors in July 2025, 62 out of 100 websites managed that on phones and 74 out of 100 on computers.

Google also writes itself that this time feeds into the order of search results. The same section says that a fast website alone will not move anyone to the top. Content comes first. Load time decides where several websites fit the question equally well, and according to Google that is often the case.

What visitors do when it takes long

The first 3 figures were collected by Google in 2016 and 2017. The fourth comes from a study by the consulting firm Deloitte for Google, measured at the end of 2019 with 37 brands in Europe and the US and 30 million visits. Both are a few years old, and both come from large shops and portals. The percentages do not transfer 1 to 1 to the website of a small business with a few dozen visitors a day. The direction is the same, and it is strongest in the first seconds.

What makes a website slow

Usually it is what the website itself brings along, and only rarely the host or the internet connection. A middle-of-the-road website today weighs a good 2 megabytes, and the phone has to download all of it.

What we measured ourselves

On the afternoon of 30.10.2026 the new home page of cross-link.ch scored 21 out of 100 on a phone in Google's test. Our own website. An animation kept running in the background and kept the phone busy, plus a font file 4 times larger than necessary. By the evening it was 83 to 88 points. On phones the animation now only starts when you tap it, the font has shrunk, and the whole page is almost a quarter lighter.

For MDM Watches we rebuilt the home page in summer 2025, with new technology in front and WordPress only in the background. It scores 100 out of 100, and we wrote about it at the time.

And on 21.10.2026, when a security flaw took many Swiss websites offline, there was nothing to fix on websites made of finished files. That has little to do with load time, but it comes from the same way of building.

The number at the foot of this page

At the bottom of every page on cross-link.ch you can see after how many seconds the page reached you. Your own browser measures that number, on your device and on your network, the same way Google does, until the title image or headline is on screen. The 4.7 next to it is the middle website from the measurement above, taken with the throttled test phone. Your network is probably faster than the one in the test, so the comparison is not entirely fair to the others. In return, your number is real and not an estimate.

How we build today

We build new websites without WordPress. The pages sit finished on the server, and the browser gets them directly, without a program assembling them first. That makes them fast without much effort on our side, and there are no plugins and no technology behind them that someone has to keep up to date. We rebuild existing WordPress sites the same way, 1 to 1, from CHF 500.