Page loads in acceptable time
Slow pages get skipped by AI crawlers. Target under 2 seconds to first content.
Why speed matters more for AI than for humans
Human visitors wait. AI crawlers do not. Most crawlers set a hard timeout of a few seconds per page. If your homepage is not returning content by then, the crawler gives up and your page is treated as unreachable.
This is worse for you than an error page, because you never know it happened. The crawler just silently drops you from its index.
Common speed killers
- — Unoptimised hero images. A 4 MB hero kills everything.
- — Third-party scripts (analytics, chat widgets, A/B testing) blocking render.
- — Client-side rendering with a slow initial data fetch.
- — Cold starts on serverless platforms.
- — Hosting in the wrong region for your audience.