Your website never sleeps. Is it any good?

In 2006, researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa flashed homepages at people for 50 milliseconds, about the length of a single frame of television, and asked how appealing each one looked. Those snap ratings closely matched the ratings people gave when the same pages stayed on screen ten times as long.

Visitors therefore form a view of your site before they have read any of it. The researchers warned that a poor first impression can outweigh a site that is easy to use and full of useful information, because many visitors leave before they find that out.

Google and SOASTA analysed data from real mobile sites and found that as load time grows from one second to three, the probability of a visitor bouncing rises by 32%. At five seconds the increase is 90%, and at ten seconds it is 123%.

Small improvements matter as well: in a study commissioned by Google, Deloitte and the agency 55 found that improving mobile site speed by just 0.1 seconds went with 8.4% more conversions for retail sites and 10.1% for travel sites.

Most of a site’s speed is decided before launch, by the weight of its pages, the number of scripts it loads and where it is hosted. Building a fast site costs far less than speeding up a slow one later.

Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab asked more than 2,600 people to compare the credibility of real websites. The factor they mentioned most often was design: 46.1% of their comments were about how a site looked, more than any other factor and well ahead of how the information was organised.

Someone who doesn’t know you yet has little to go on besides layout, type and spacing, so a tidy site suggests that your work and your invoices will be tidy too.

Phones now account for about six in ten web visits worldwide. The share varies by country and sector, so your own analytics may show a different split, but plenty of your visitors meet you on a small screen, one thumb free, on a train or between two meetings.

On a good website the phone version is designed for the phone, with buttons big enough for a thumb, text you can read without zooming, and nothing important hidden behind a hover effect that a touchscreen cannot trigger. If you switch the view below, the layout rearranges itself instead of shrinking.

A website that nobody can find does about as much good as a brochure in a drawer. Search engines and AI assistants read parts of a site that visitors never see, such as page titles and descriptions, the order of headings, structured data and the sitemap, and they also measure how quickly the pages load on a phone.

No one can guarantee a ranking, but a well-built site is easy for both people and machines to understand, which gives you a fair chance when someone searches for what you offer. Flip the card below to see Atélier Haya as a crawler reads it.

<title>Atélier Haya · Handmade ceramics, Lausanne</title>
<meta name="description"
      content="Bowls, cups and plates thrown by hand in Lausanne. Visit the studio or order online.">
<h1>Handmade ceramics for everyday tables</h1>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{ "@type": "Store",
  "name": "Atélier Haya",
  "address": "Lausanne, CH" }
</script>

Some costs of a website only appear when you try to move it: the domain is registered to the agency, the site runs only on their platform, nobody can find the original files, and even a small change ends up meaning a rebuild.

You should be able to hand a good website to another developer tomorrow, so every Hayanezu project ends with a handover of the files, the access details and the agreed rights.