A hummingbird’s wings beat eighty times per second; if a flower delays its nectar by even a blink, the bird is gone. Online shoppers have the same reflex: add three seconds of page load time and half your mobile visitors vanish, add two more and your conversion funnel collapses like a house of cards. Neuroscience explains the haste—our brains equate delay with risk, triggering the amygdala to whisper “leave before it breaks.” Akamai’s 2024 benchmark proved every extra second shaves roughly 7 % off e‑commerce conversion, a silent tax on ad budgets everywhere. Speed is revenue, and the first race starts before HTML arrives—inside the URL bar. Long, parameter‑stuffed links force extra DNS lookups and chains of redirects through analytics, affiliate, and ad servers. Each hop costs tens or hundreds of milliseconds, multiplying over spotty 4G. A well‑built short link removes that drag: one domain, one lookup, one redirect served from the closest Anycast node. Tests show that when Surl.li handles the jump, server‑side latency averages twelve milliseconds—shorter than a human blink—so the browser requests your landing page almost instantly. There’s a psychological booster, too. A tidy slug like surl.li/join‑now signals professionalism; users subconsciously grant more patience to sites that look deliberate, making the same 1.8‑second load feel quicker than a messy URL’s identical wait. Clean links also survive messaging apps and social previews without truncation, reducing broken clicks and retries that inflate perceived slowness. Real‑world numbers tell the story: a Central‑European EdTech startup trimmed its average time‑to‑first‑byte by 180 ms simply by replacing raw UTM monsters with branded short links, lifting signup conversion 5.4 %—no new creatives, no pricing tweaks. Why? Less delay means less time for doubt to blossom. In digital persuasion, milliseconds outrun design overhauls costing thousands. Page‑speed optimization is usually framed as a developer’s chore—compress images, lazy‑load scripts—but it actually begins one step earlier with link strategy. Strip the detours and every subsequent tweak amplifies. So before polishing micro‑animations or A/B‑testing button colors, make sure the address itself isn’t the slowest line of code you ship. The shortest distance from curiosity to content is still a straight line, and in commerce that line earns the click, keeps the visitor, seals the sale.