A tenth of a second
Why the speed gap between this site and a typical WordPress site exists, why it costs real money, and why it isn’t the owner’s fault.
Open a new tab. Go to otrovertlabs.com. Right-click, Inspect, Lighthouse tab, hit Analyze. I'll wait — it takes about thirty seconds.
On the desktop setting you'll see a performance score of 100, a first contentful paint of around a third of a second, and a layout shift of exactly zero. Switch the device to mobile — Lighthouse deliberately simulates a slow 4G phone — and it still lands in the mid-nineties or better. Those throttled numbers are the pessimistic floor: on ordinary broadband, the real first paint is closer to the tenth of a second in the title.
Now run the same test on any small-business website you know. A contractor, a law office, a dental practice. Most of them are on WordPress, and most of them will land somewhere between 20 and 60 on mobile, with four to eight seconds passing before the page settles down enough to read.
This post is about why that gap exists, why it costs real money, and why it isn't the business owner's fault.
What the numbers mean
Google measures three things that matter here. First contentful paint — how long before anything useful appears. Largest contentful paint — how long before the main content is up. Cumulative layout shift — how much the page jumps around while loading (that thing where you go to tap a button and it moves).
Google's own "good" thresholds: main content under 2.5 seconds, layout shift under 0.1. These aren't vanity metrics. Google uses them in ranking, and your visitors use them in the only vote that counts — the back button. The data on this is consistent and public: as load time goes from one second to three, the probability of a bounce climbs steeply. Every second is customers who never saw your phone number.
Why the typical small-business site fails the test
Not because the owner did anything wrong. Because of how these sites get built.
The standard path: WordPress, a premium theme, a page builder (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery), and a dozen plugins accumulated over the years — a form here, a gallery there, an SEO helper, a security patch for the security patch. Every one of those ships JavaScript and CSS to every visitor, on every page, whether the page uses it or not. The homepage of a typical small-business WordPress site weighs several megabytes, and most of that weight is machinery, not content. Your customer's phone downloads the whole workshop to read one page.
A static site inverts this. The page is built once, ahead of time, and the visitor gets finished HTML — no assembly on arrival, nothing to execute before the content shows. That's the entire trick. This site has no secret. It just doesn't make your phone do the work.
The honest part
Does a fraction of a second versus five seconds matter for every business? No. If your customers are all referrals who were going to call you anyway, your slow site is costing you less than a rebuild costs. And WordPress earns its weight for some sites — daily publishing with multiple editors, complex storefronts. I say this in writing on my own migration page: some sites should stay where they are.
But if strangers find you through search, the math is simple. You paid for the click — in SEO effort or in ad spend — and then the site spends five seconds talking them out of it.
The test costs nothing
Run Lighthouse on your own site today. You don't need me for that, and the number you get is the honest starting point for any conversation about whether it's worth fixing — with me or with anyone.
If you want the plain-English version of what your numbers mean for your business, I do written teardowns for free: what your site weighs, what's slowing it down, what fixing it would cost, and an honest verdict — including "keep what you have" when that's the truth.
Tony builds websites and AI systems at OtrovertLabs in Newark, Delaware. The numbers on this page are measurable right now, in your browser — that's the point.