Picture this. Someone's kitchen tap is leaking. They grab their phone, search for a plumber and tap the first result. Your site starts loading. And loading. They stare at a white screen for a few seconds, go back, and tap the next plumber instead.
You never knew that visit happened. It doesn't show up as a lost sale anywhere. That's what makes slow websites so sneaky.
Most of your visitors are on a phone
For local businesses, a big share of traffic comes from mobile, often from people out and about, sometimes on a patchy signal. Google also looks at the mobile version of your site first when deciding how to rank it. If the phone experience is poor, you're losing both ways.
What counts as slow?
There's no magic number, but as a rough guide, if your main content takes more than a few seconds to show up on a phone, people start to leave. Every extra second makes it worse. Fast sites feel instant. Slow ones feel broken.
Google measures this with a set of signals called Core Web Vitals. In plain terms, they ask three things.
- How fast does the main content appear?
- How quickly does the page respond when someone taps something?
- Does the layout jump around while loading, making you tap the wrong thing?
The usual suspects
Giant images
The most common problem by a mile. Someone uploads a 6 megabyte photo straight from their phone camera and displays it in a space the size of a postage stamp. Images should be resized to the size they're shown at, and saved in a modern, compressed format.
Too many plugins and scripts
Every chat widget, popup, tracking tool and slider adds weight. Some sites load a dozen scripts that nobody on the team could explain. If you can't say what it does for you, it's a candidate for removal.
Slow hosting
If your server takes a long time to respond, nothing else you do can fully make up for it. Budget hosting that's crowded and far from your visitors is a common cause.
Heavy website builders and themes
Some drag and drop builders and bulky themes ship a lot of code your page never uses. It all has to download before the page works properly.
Autoplay video and fancy effects
A full screen video background looks cool on a fast office computer. On a phone with two bars of signal, it's a roadblock.
How to test your own site for free
- Open Google's PageSpeed Insights, which is free.
- Paste in your website address.
- Look at the mobile results first, not the desktop ones.
- Read the top few suggestions. They're usually things like "properly size images" or "reduce unused code."
You can also try the plain old test. Pull out your phone, turn off wifi, and load your own site over mobile data. If you find yourself getting impatient, so will your customers.
Don't obsess over getting a perfect score. A 100 isn't the goal. Getting into a healthy range, and making sure the real experience feels quick, is plenty for a local business.
Quick wins
- Resize and compress every image before it goes on the site.
- Load images below the fold only when someone scrolls to them.
- Remove plugins, widgets and tracking tools you don't use.
- Skip auto playing background video.
- Use decent hosting with a content delivery network, which serves your site from a location close to the visitor.
What we do differently
Speed is one of the reasons we build lightweight sites and serve them through Cloudflare's network. There's less code to download and the content is delivered from servers near your visitors. We also optimize images as part of the build, so you don't have to think about it.
If you want to see where your site stands, run our free audit. It checks load time along with a handful of other basics, and it takes seconds.