Hey, our website is really slow, we need to address it.
Website speed is often seen as a technical task, necessary to keep the website running smoothly but not directly driving revenue. Yet, site speed affects all aspects of the customer journey, from acquisition to conversion and beyond.
Consider what happens when a customer clicks an ad and is directed to a slow-loading landing page. They wait a few seconds, become impatient, and click away to a competitor’s website. High bounce rates and lost revenue opportunities—and those are just the most immediate outcomes of sluggish loading times.
Any ad revenue spent along this journey is completely wasted, along with any revenue the customer could have generated had their attention been maintained. Additionally, when a website takes too long to load, customers lose trust and become less likely to return in the future. Their lifetime value is reduced, as is overall revenue.
It’s clear that improved site speed offers tangible financial benefits—but site speed is more than just a technical challenge. It requires collaboration between marketing, operations, and engineering teams to identify where slowdowns are happening, what the root causes are, and how to best address them.
Teams are busy, so proposed initiatives like web performance improvements are often met with some initial resistance. Let’s explore common objections marketing teams raise toward improving site speed, and how you can help navigate these conversations.
Sure, a faster website would be nice, but site speed is an IT problem and not the responsibility of marketing.
Is IT also responsible for driving traffic to the site? SEO rank? ROAS?
Sure, IT departments support the technical foundation of a website, but they too are overloaded, and rarely set their own priorities.
Think of our website like a race car. While IT is building the vehicle, marketing is filling it with cargo. This includes our blog posts, landing pages, products, images, videos, or embedding a dozen tracking pixels. These additional elements, though necessary for our success, slow down the website.
It takes both teams working in harmony to have a fast race car (err... website) that meets the customer’s expectations. Collaboration between marketing and IT will always result in a better customer experience.
Why invest in costly labor to make minute changes when we have proven return on investment (ROI) for other tactics?
What if this is our most profitable untapped initiative? A faster website can lead to better ROAS, better conversion rates, and better customer experiences, all of which can have a major impact on profitability and business health.
When thinking about slow landing pages leading to lost ad revenue, consider these stats:
The fact is, site speed improvements pay for themselves, and then some. That said, we don't have to go whole hog to see a meaningful impact. Even small changes like optimizing images or prioritizing the most important page elements can yield considerable boosts in user experience and website performance.
Proposing a phased approach that starts with quick wins can be a smart first step to build buy-in and momentum.
Okay, so you've made a case for budget. But I'm still concerned that our resources would be better spent on other marketing efforts.
What's a blog without a readership? An ad without clicks? Site speed should be seen as fuel for your marketing strategy–not competing with it.
Face it, every marketing tactic is more effective on a faster website. Ads, SEO, lead magnets, and blog posts are all generated with the goal of getting more visitors. If a website can't handle those additional visits, or if users leave because the page takes too long to load, then what was the point?
We also know that Google uses site speed as a ranking factor. Slow websites cause friction for users and therefore get buried in search results. On the other hand, faster websites are ranked higher, drawing in more visitors to interact with our site, and getting more eyes on the marketing content you worked so hard to create.
A faster website will amplify the impact of everything we do.
Site speed is highly technical, and it may be difficult for the marketing team to understand all the nuances.
Site speed IS complex, and there are resources that can support us to make it easier to understand. Our team needs a playbook that explains the different components of website speed as they relate to the marketing functions, such as image formats, file sizes, browser caching, third party tags,, etc.
Many other marketing teams have successfully improved site speed and revenue. Here’s an example of how SpeedSense helped Clearly come together to pass Core Web Vitals, or how they helped Ingram Micro grab a 35% lift in organic traffic.
If they can tackle the complexity, so can we.
We need results now. Site speed improvements may not show any immediate improvement in user experience or revenue.
Sure, just like the fact that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. But, the second best time is now. If everyone assumes the same attitude, no one plants a tree at all.
The same holds true for website speed improvements. If we continuously put off improving our site speed, we risk missing potential revenue today, tomorrow, and well into the future.
If you’re really worried about impact, let’s start small. There are often low-effort changes that yield a meaningful impact in the short term. These include optimizing images, minimizing redirects, cleaning up tag managers, and deprioritizing the loading of third-party plugins. These changes also provide long-term value and set us up for more substantial gains down the road.
It's not always easy to get multiple stakeholders, departments, teams, and reporting hierarchies on the same page. This is especially true with complicated, cross-functional technical tasks like website optimization and site speed.
The key to success is a collaboration between engineering, marketing, and leadership teams to identify challenges and prioritize tasks based on the overall goals of the organization. Using a combination of technical tools and benchmarks along with qualitative feedback helps stakeholders understand the impact of website speed improvements.
If your organization is ready to invest in site speed, get in touch. Our web performance consulting team knows what it takes to find harmony between departments and deliver measurable ROI. Let us show you how.
