Three Sites.
Three Revenue Leaks.
What Changed.

The situation

This store was doing $8,500/month in revenue — reasonable for a niche product. They'd spent heavily on photography, email marketing, and Instagram ads ($600/month). Conversion rate sat at 1.8%, which felt normal to the owner.

What they didn't know: their hosting was serving pages from an Apache server with no caching, shared with hundreds of other sites, responding at an average of 847ms before any content loaded. Their paid traffic was bouncing at a higher rate than it should, and every ad dollar was working harder than it needed to.

What the numbers showed

What changed

Migration took one afternoon — InterServer's free migration service handled the WordPress database and files. The owner didn't change a single line of code or reconfigure anything. TTFB dropped from 847ms to 162ms (verified across three runs).

Within 30 days, Google Search Console showed LCP improving from "Poor" to "Good." The 2.6% conversion headwind disappeared, returning the store toward its ~1.85% baseline — a ~3% relative improvement, plus 6.5 points of bounce recovered on $600/month of paid traffic. At $8,500/month revenue, that compounds to $3,106/year.

The situation

The founder had spent three months tweaking headline copy, button colours, and social proof sections, chasing the signup rate. The landing page was well-designed. The copy was sharp. Trial conversion stayed stubbornly at 3.2%.

A chance look at PageSpeed Insights revealed "Poor" Core Web Vitals across the board, driven by a 1,140ms TTFB from GoDaddy's shared infrastructure. Every Google Ads visitor was waiting over a second for the first byte — before the hero image loaded, before any copy appeared.

What the numbers showed

The hidden lever

The ad waste figure is the one that stings. At $1,400/month in Google Ads, a bounce rate increase of 9.4% from latency (1,140ms → 940ms excess × 1% per 100ms, capped per our methodology) meant roughly $132/month in ad spend producing zero return. Not poor targeting. Not bad copy. Physics: the page was too slow to load before visitors left.

After migration, the founder continued running the same ads with zero creative changes. The change was invisible to users but the signup rate moved from 3.2% toward the ~3.3% model baseline — a 3.8% relative improvement — within 45 days, instead of the previous quarter of flat CRO work.

The situation

Content sites have a different revenue model — display ads and affiliate links rather than direct sales. But they're equally sensitive to TTFB, for different reasons. Ad networks pay based on viewable impressions and session depth. Readers who bounce after one slow-loading page generate one page view instead of four.

At 45,000 visitors/month and a $4.20 RPM, this blog earned about $189/month from display ads. Affiliate revenue (credit card referrals, savings account recommendations) added another $280/month. Total: around $469/month.

What the numbers showed

The SEO angle

For content sites, there's a compounding factor our calculator doesn't capture: organic search ranking. Google's Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal. A blog with Poor TTFB and failing LCP scores is competing at a disadvantage against equivalent content on faster hosting.

In this scenario, after migration and enabling LiteSpeed Cache (included free with InterServer), PageSpeed Insights scores jumped from 38 to 81 on mobile. Within 90 days, several target keywords moved from positions 8–12 to positions 3–6 — a traffic increase that compounded the direct revenue improvement.

The ceiling effect

The most important insight from content site analysis: slow hosting doesn't just reduce revenue from existing traffic. It caps growth by suppressing the organic rankings that would bring additional traffic. Fixing infrastructure unlocks both the current revenue and the ceiling above it.