Fast, Accessible, and Built to Last
Pull up your website on your phone right now. Count the seconds until the page finishes loading. If you got past three, you have a problem.
Google has been clear about this for years: site speed affects your search ranking. But it also affects something more immediate. Visitors leave. A study by Portent found that a site loading in one second converts at three times the rate of a site loading in five seconds. For a local business, that's the difference between a phone call and a bounce.
Most of the local business sites I look at score between 30 and 50 on Google's PageSpeed Insights test. The sites I build score above 90. That's not a flex. It's a baseline.
What Slows a Site Down
The usual culprits are oversized images, bloated plugins, cheap hosting, and code that was never optimized. Agencies that build on heavy platforms or use page builders with dozens of third-party scripts tend to deliver sites that look fine but load slowly.
You can test your own site for free at pagespeed.web.dev. The score is out of 100, and anything under 50 on mobile is a problem worth fixing. Pay attention to the "Largest Contentful Paint" metric in particular. That's how long it takes for the main content on your page to become visible. Under 2.5 seconds is the target.
Accessibility Is the Other Half
Speed gets attention because it's easy to measure. Accessibility is harder to see, but it matters just as much.
About 27% of adults in the United States have some type of disability. That includes visual impairments, motor limitations, cognitive differences, and more. If your website doesn't account for these users, you're excluding a significant portion of your potential customers.
Accessibility doesn't mean your site has to look clinical or boring. It means building with intention. Proper color contrast so text is readable in bright light or for someone with low vision. Semantic HTML so screen readers can navigate your pages. Keyboard accessibility so someone who can't use a mouse can still fill out your contact form. Alt text on images so the content makes sense even when the visuals don't load.
These are basics, and most template sites skip them entirely.
Why Agencies Don't Prioritize This
Speed and accessibility take effort during the build. It's faster (and cheaper for the agency) to use a page builder, drop in a template, and ship it. Optimizing images, writing semantic code, and testing for accessibility all add time. That time costs money the agency would rather not spend, especially if you're not asking for it.
The result is a site that looks acceptable but underperforms where it counts: in search rankings, in conversion rates, and in serving every visitor who lands on it.
What Better Looks Like
Every site Vistoso Creative builds runs on Next.js, the same framework behind Nike.com, TikTok, The Washington Post, Stripe, and Target. It's used by over 50,000 companies worldwide because it's fast, secure, and built for growth. Your local business gets the same core technology that powers some of the highest traffic sites on the internet.
That's not overkill. It's the reason your site loads in under a second, scores above 90 on PageSpeed, and won't need to be rebuilt when your business scales. The framework handles server-side rendering, image optimization, and smart caching out of the box. These are features that page builders and template platforms either can't do or charge extra to approximate.
Every site is also designed to be accessible. That's a public commitment, and it applies to every project regardless of tier.
Fast sites rank better, convert better, and respect your visitors' time. Accessible sites reach more people and reflect the kind of business you want to be. Neither of these is an upgrade or an add-on. They're how a website should be built in the first place.
If you're not sure where your site stands, I'll run a free audit during your consultation and show you the numbers. I also offer standalone accessibility audits and SEO optimization if you're not ready for a full rebuild.