Why your Austin business needs a faster website (and how slow is costing you customers)

A customer decides in under 3 seconds whether to stay on your site. If it takes longer than that to load, they're already on Yelp looking at your competitor. This isn't a theory — Google's data shows 53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Most local business sites are slow for one of three reasons: they're built on old platforms (Wix, Squarespace, or a custom build from 2017) with unoptimized images, they're hosted on shared servers with no CDN, or they're running WordPress with 12 plugins that each load their own scripts.

The result: a 6-second load time on a mobile network. On mobile is where 70%+ of local searches happen, especially in a city like Austin where people are searching for dinner while they're already out.

Core Web Vitals — Google's metrics for how fast and stable a page feels — are a confirmed ranking factor for local search. A slow site ranks lower, which means fewer people find you organically, which means every customer costs you more in ad spend to reach.

Speed is not just a user experience issue. It's a discovery issue.

Lighthouse is Google's open-source tool for measuring website performance. It scores four dimensions: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. We build every collier.dev site to a 98/100 Performance score.

In plain terms: the page loads fast, the content appears quickly without layout shifts, and the interactive elements respond immediately. On a real mobile network, that's a sub-2-second load.

For a restaurant in Austin, that's the difference between a customer who sees your menu and one who bounces to the next result.

Test your site at PageSpeed.web.dev on mobile. If your Performance score is below 50, you're losing customers to load time right now.

Compress your images. A 4MB hero photo becomes 200KB with lossless compression, and nobody can tell the difference visually.

Remove the autoplay video in your hero section. It's the single biggest source of slow loads on local business sites.

If you're on shared hosting with no CDN, switch. The difference in load time is usually 2–3 seconds, which is the difference between a bounce and a conversion.

Or hand it to someone who handles this so you can get back to your actual work.