Web 24 min
What a slow website actually costs
The 7% figure comes from a 2008 survey of 160 executives. Here is what has actually been measured, and where your site sits against sixteen million others.
Web
A site that is judged on what it produces
Brief, platform, landing pages, forms, speed, measurement and legal duties: what decides whether a visit becomes a conversation, and what merely decides whether the site looks good.
A website is one of the few purchases judged almost entirely on appearance, and almost never on what it produces. The brief says « modern », the quotes come back at wildly different prices, and nobody can explain the gap.
These articles are about the parts that can be specified, verified and measured. They are deliberately unromantic.
Where to start, depending on your situation
- You are about to commission a site. Writing a website brief and how much a B2B website costs settle the two questions that produce the widest quotes. If the current site is the problem, seven measurable signs it is time to redesign keeps the decision out of the realm of opinion.
- You are choosing a platform. The best website platform for B2B firms compares them on what actually differs, and what hosting decides covers the half of the decision nobody discusses.
- Your traffic does not convert. Start with the denominator nobody checks, because a conversion rate without one means nothing. Then the anatomy of a high-converting landing page, how many form fields (whose founding study had ten conversions) and what happens after the form.
- You are not sure what your analytics is telling you. What GA4 does not show you, the bounce rate that measures something else entirely, and the tracking plan as a list of things you refuse to measure.
- You are worried about speed, migration or the law. Website speed: what matters separates the real thresholds from the Amazon number that never existed. Migration without losing rankings and web accessibility and US litigation cover the two moments where a mistake is expensive.
The common thread: a site is a machine with an input and an output. Everything here is about making the output visible, so the next decision is an arbitration rather than a matter of taste. Our full approach is on the B2B web design page.
32 articles in this category. See all resources
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- Web 24 min
Writing a Website Brief
The brief that specifies features before anyone has looked at the problem is the one that produces a site nobody uses. Two governments publish the alternative.
- Web 25 min
B2B Website Usability That Is Testable
Most usability advice is taste. Six requirements added in 2024 are not: they have numbers, they apply to your forms, and almost no B2B site meets them.
- Web 22 min
From Website to Booked Meeting
One controlled study nearly doubled first-attempt form success. Most of the advice built on top of it has no sample size at all.
- Web 23 min
What a B2B Homepage Has to Do
Attention is front-loaded, not fold-bounded. The measured figures are more useful than the folklore, and one of them is twenty years old.
- Web 25 min
Site Structure and Breadcrumbs
Google says it does not read your folder structure to understand your site. It reads your links. That single sentence rewrites most architecture advice.
- Web 21 min
A Design System a Small Team Can Maintain
Two governments publish theirs, including the parts nobody copies: the rule for admitting a new component, and the status that means stop using this.
- Web 24 min
Landing Page Structures by Objective
Choosing a structure is easy. Knowing whether it worked is the hard part, and the published experimentation data says most teams are reading noise.
- Web 26 min
Choosing and Keeping a Domain Name
You do not own your domain. ICANN says so in those words. What follows from that governs transfers, expiry, disputes and the day you change it.
- Web 27 min
Conversion Rate: The Denominator Nobody Checks
Ad blockers and consent refusal cut the visitor count before you divide. What is actually in that denominator, and what it does to the ratio.
- Web 24 min
What US Law Requires on a B2B Website
No federal cookie law and no legal notices page. One privacy policy is genuinely mandatory, with no size threshold, and it applies to a two-person firm.
- Web 23 min
Consent on Lead Capture Forms
US law does not ask for consent before your form. It asks for notice at the moment of collection, and forbids collecting at all without it.
- Web 23 min
Choosing a B2B SEO Provider: Google Wrote the Questions
Eight questions Google publishes, the warning signs it lists, and why a ranking guarantee is a legal exposure and not merely a bad promise.
- Web 21 min
The Website Maintenance Contract: The Five Gaps in Scope
Most maintenance contracts cover updates and backups. The failures that actually take a B2B site down are certificates, redirects and the person who left.
- Web 23 min
B2B Website Hosting: What It Actually Decides
Server location is not a definitive ranking signal, in Google's own words. Time to first byte is not a Core Web Vital. Two hosting claims, both qualified.
- Web 23 min
Website Migration: Keep the Redirects at Least a Year
Google publishes the retention period, the chain limit and which moves its change of address tool covers. Most migration checklists get the last one wrong.
- Web 23 min
Technical SEO: Three Requirements, Not a Sixty-Point Audit
Google publishes exactly three minimum technical requirements. It also says most sites should not read its crawl budget guide, and gives the page count.
- Web 25 min
Website Speed: What Matters, and the Number That Never Was
The 100ms claim traces to a 2006 blog post containing no number at all. The real experiments were run by search engines and found far smaller effects.
- Web 25 min
Web Accessibility: Thousands of US Lawsuits, No US Standard
Thousands of accessibility cases a year, under a regime that sets no technical standard for private business. Europe has the standard and almost no suits.
- Web 24 min
AI Overviews and Organic Traffic: Estimates Run 5% to 58%
The SEO tools say 58%. The two studies with causal designs say 40% and 5%. Google says stable, and publishes no figures at all.
- Web 23 min
The Tracking Plan Is a List of Things You Refuse to Measure
Every event you add costs cardinality, review time and a reason to argue. The useful document is the one that says no, and records why.
- Web 23 min
What GA4 Does Not Show You
Four mechanisms silently remove or alter data before you see it. Three publish exact thresholds. The one that hides the most publishes no number at all.
- Web 23 min
The Thank You Page, and Who Published the 5-Minute Rule
The 21x figure is not from Harvard. It comes from a 2007 study co-published by a company selling software that dials leads faster.
- Web 24 min
How Many Landing Pages? What the 7x Study Cannot Tell You
The figure exists, the sample is disclosed, and the arithmetic is fine. It compares companies, not strategies, and the source itself says correlate.
- Web 23 min
How Many Form Fields? The Founding Study Had Ten Conversions
The 120% figure is real and traceable. It rests on 10 submissions before and 26 after, a year apart. The largest dataset points the other way.
- Web 27 min
Call to Action: What You Can Verify, and What You Cannot
The famous button tests publish no per-variant sample size. The accessibility thresholds are exact, normative, and checkable without a single visitor.
- Web 25 min
GA4 Bounce Rate: The Same Word, Measuring Something Else
It is now the inverse of engagement rate, so it carries no information that metric does not. And on a landing page it was always the wrong instrument.
- Web 25 min
Dedicated Landing Page or Website Page: What Decides It
The rule is not that paid traffic needs a dedicated page. It is that a page you cannot maintain is worse than a site page you already do.
- Web 12 min
The Best Website Platform for B2B Firms
No single platform is best for B2B, only the right one for your goal. A result-first look at Webflow, WordPress, Astro and Framer, with sourced data.
- Web 9 min
B2B Website Redesign: 7 Measurable Signs It’s Time
Redesign your B2B website when the numbers say so, not when it looks old. Seven measurable signs, the cost of waiting, and how to redesign without losing SEO.
- Web 13 min
Anatomy of a High-Converting B2B Landing Page
The sections a high-converting B2B landing page needs, annotated one by one, with US benchmarks for conversion rate, form fields and lead response.
- Web 12 min
How Much Does a B2B Website Cost? US Price Ranges
A custom build runs $10,000 to $50,000, a lead-generation site past $100,000. What puts a project at the top of the range, and the cost of ownership.
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