Running Ads to a Slow Website? You're Paying Google Twice

A slow landing page makes you pay twice for your ads. First, you pay for clicks from people who give up before the page loads. Google's own research found 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Second, Google says ad and landing page quality feed into Ad Rank, and higher quality ads can often mean lower costs per click, so a poor page can raise what every click costs.

If you're running ads, your website is part of the campaign whether you think of it that way or not. Here's how to see what it's costing and what to do about it.

How much do bounced clicks cost?

Take an example budget. £600 a month at £2 a click buys 300 visits. If the page is slow enough that 40% of those people leave before it loads, that's 120 clicks, or £240 a month, spent on visitors who never saw the page.

The 40% is an illustration. Your own figure depends on how slow the page is, which is why the checks below matter.

Does a slow website make Google Ads more expensive?

It can. Google lists the factors in Ad Rank, and one of them is ad and landing page quality, including how useful the landing page is and how easy it is to use. Google says that higher quality ads can often lead to lower CPCs.

Landing page experience is also one of the three parts of Quality Score, alongside expected click-through rate and ad relevance. Google describes Quality Score as a diagnostic tool rather than a direct input to the auction, but it's a good early warning that your page is holding your ads back.

Why does my site seem fine when I test it?

Because you're on wifi, your browser has already saved most of the site, and you're not the customer. Your customer is on a phone, on mobile data, outside the school gates.

Test that instead. Put the page your ad sends people to into PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile score, not the desktop one. Above 80 is good. Under 50 and part of your ad budget is paying for a speed problem.

What makes a website slow?

In my experience it's nearly always some mix of these five:

• Oversized images. A 4MB photo where a 90KB one would look the same on a phone.
• Page builder code. Drag-and-drop platforms send a lot of code with every page, whether the page needs it or not.
• Too many plugins. Each one adds weight, and they pile up over the years.
• Cheap shared hosting. A server shared with thousands of other sites answers when it gets round to it.
• Old tracking scripts. Pixels from past campaigns, a chat widget nobody uses, three analytics tools doing one job.

None of it changes how the site looks. All of it changes what your leads cost.

How do I check this in my Google Ads account?

Open the campaign, go to the keywords view and add the Landing page experience column from the Quality Score group. Google rates each keyword's landing page as above average, average or below average. Below average is worth fixing before you spend another pound.

Then compare how paid visitors behave against everyone else in your analytics. If people from ads leave faster than people from Google search, a slow page is a likely cause, because they arrived wanting what you sell and still gave up.

Should I fix my site or replace it?

It depends what's underneath.

• If the site is basically sound, send it for a free website check. I'll record a short video showing what's slowing it down. Images, dead scripts and hosting are often cheap to fix.
• If it's a page-builder tangle, a new one usually makes more sense. A fast four-page website from me is £300, and on the example above it pays for itself in a couple of months of ad spend.

If you're not getting found in the normal results either, the usual causes are in why your Guildford business isn't showing up on Google. I'm based in Woking and work across Surrey. Tell me what you're running and I'll say which route fits.