A 1.5-Second Load-Time Gap Costs a Small Electrical Business Roughly €14,000 a Year

Ten inquiries a month, a 3.8-second homepage, and a gap of 1.5 seconds to where Google says a page should land. That's the whole setup for this constructed example — a small electrical contractor with nine employees, built to show how a load-time gap turns into an actual euro figure rather than a vague sense that "the site could be faster."

The starting numbers

A free website check flags the load time first: 3.8 seconds. Google's own benchmark for the Largest Contentful Paint metric is under 2.5 seconds for a page to count as good, as summarized by huchel-medienagentur.de. The gap is 1.5 seconds. Three assumptions carry the rest of this calculation, and they're named as assumptions because that's what they are: ten website inquiries per month, a 30 percent close rate, and an average job value of €2,200. That's 3 jobs a month and €6,600 in web-attributed monthly revenue, at the current 3.8 seconds.

Before any of the arithmetic below means anything, there has to be a measured number to work from. That's what a free website check like the one at log-sysdev.de is for: load time, basic SEO signals, technical fundamentals, all in one pass. Skip that step, and everything downstream is guesswork dressed up as math.

Turning a second into a percentage

Amazon's own internal measurement found that every additional 100 milliseconds of load time cost roughly 1 percent in sales, also documented at huchel-medienagentur.de. A 1.5-second gap is fifteen steps of 100 milliseconds. That's 15 percent.

This is a steep transfer to make — Amazon's ratio comes from millions of e-commerce transactions, and the contractor in this example closes three jobs a month. The number is worth using anyway, not as a prediction but as an order of magnitude: it tells you load time is expensive, not exactly how expensive for this one business.

Turning the percentage into euros

If today's €6,600 a month sits 15 percent below what's achievable at 2.3 seconds, then €6,600 represents 85 percent of that optimized figure. The optimized monthly revenue works out to €6,600 ÷ 0.85 = €7,764.71.

The difference is €1,164.71 a month. Multiplied across twelve months: €13,976.47 a year — roughly €14,000 sitting on the table because the page takes 1.5 seconds longer than it should.

Checking it against a smaller and a larger business

Anyone doubting whether this only works at exactly ten inquiries a month should rerun it at a different scale, since the arithmetic is the same either way. Halve the inquiries to five a month, and current revenue drops to €3,300, optimized to €3,882.35 — a difference of €582.35 a month, €6,988.24 a year, roughly €6,990. Double it to twenty inquiries, and the result doubles too: €2,329.41 a month, €27,952.94 a year, roughly €27,950.

The model scales in a straight line because it's built as a straight line. That's exactly where it starts to strain.

Where the calculation stops holding up

A business with five inquiries a month doesn't have a stable average. It has a number that swings between three and eight depending on the season, on word of mouth, on plain chance. Whether a slow week traces back to load time or simply to a holiday period isn't something a single ratio can tell you. The 15 percent transfer from Amazon's figure is an analogy, not a measurement taken on this specific site — it demonstrates that speed costs money, not the exact size of the bill for this one contractor.

The reverse also matters: bounce rates don't rise from load time alone. Contentsquare's Digital Benchmark Report puts the average bounce rate at 47 percent across the industries it covers, with pop-ups and weak content sitting alongside slow pages as the other main drivers, reported by HORIZONT. Fix the load time on a page with a confusing offer or messy navigation, and inquiries will still be lost — just for a different reason. For anyone who wants to know exactly where their own site is losing time in the first place, this list of concrete speed-test questions goes through it step by step.

For a business that has never actually measured where its own site loses time, the free website check from log-sysdev.de mentioned earlier is the reasonable starting point — it produces the number that makes any of this arithmetic possible in the first place. And for anyone who wants the fix, not just the diagnosis, the same team builds websites, AI integrations and apps directly with developers, without an agency layer in between.

The €14,000 in this example isn't a forecast for next year's bank statement. It's a sequence: measurement first, transfer second, limits of the transfer third — in that order, not the other way round.