Why Every St Helens Business Deserves a Fast, Reliable Website

Why Website Performance Matters for Local Businesses

If you’re running a business in St Helens, Newton-le-Willows or anywhere in Merseyside, your website is likely the first impression many customers will have of your brand. And in 2025, that impression needs to be fast, clear, and easy to act on.

We’ve all experienced the frustration of a website that takes too long to load—whether it’s a local restaurant menu that won’t open or a contact page that never fully loads. But beyond being annoying, slow websites can actually cost businesses real money.

Why speed matters

Page speed is more than a “nice to have”—it directly impacts customer experience and your position in Google search rankings. Research shows that websites taking more than 3 seconds to load lose over half of their visitors. For a small business, that could mean lost bookings, abandoned baskets, or missed enquiries.

In St Helens and the surrounding areas, where competition is growing and consumers are increasingly looking online before making a purchase or booking a service, performance gives you an edge. A faster website can help you:

• Convert more customers – The quicker your site loads, the more likely people are to stay and take action.
• Improve SEO rankings – Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, especially on mobile.
• Build trust – A smooth, professional site builds credibility from the first click.

What’s slowing local businesses down?

Many of the sites we’ve reviewed for local businesses are built on outdated platforms, with large unoptimised images, unused plugins, and slow, low-cost hosting. These are all things that can be fixed without rebuilding your site from scratch.

At TWP Agency, we’ve helped clients improve their load times by cleaning up code, switching to faster, more secure hosting, and implementing simple optimisations like lazy loading images and reducing unnecessary scripts.

The local advantage

One of the reasons we’re passionate about working with businesses in St Helens and across Merseyside is that we understand the local landscape. You don’t need to be running a national e-commerce brand to benefit from a high-performing website. Whether you’re a physio, coffee shop, wedding photographer or tradesperson, your customers are looking for information quickly—on their phones, during a lunch break, or while walking down Church Street.

A fast site means they’re more likely to find you, trust you, and choose you.

What can you do today?

If you’re unsure how your website is performing, here are a few steps to start with:

• Test your website speed using PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix
• Check your hosting – budget hosting often means shared servers and slower load times
• Optimise your images – large, high-res images can dramatically slow down mobile load times
• Talk to a local agency – (hello 👋) we can run a free audit and let you know what’s worth fixing

Final thoughts

Customers expect more from websites now—and that includes the ones run by small, independent businesses. A fast, responsive site isn’t about keeping up with trends—it’s about giving your customers the experience they already expect.

If you’re based in St Helens or nearby and think your site could be performing better, we’d love to help.