Why your website is slow on a phone, and what it costs you

Your site is fast on your laptop, on office wifi, with everything already cached. That is not the test. The test is a four year old Android phone on mobile data at 7pm, which is what most of your visitors are actually holding.

Speed matters twice over: Google uses it as a ranking signal, and people leave slow pages. The second one costs more than the first.

Measure it properly first

1. 01Open PageSpeed Insights and enter your address.
2. 02Read the mobile tab, not desktop. The two scores are often twenty points apart and only one of them matters.
3. 03Look at Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the main thing on the page appears. Under about two and a half seconds is the target.
4. 04Test an inner page too, not just the home page. Inner pages are usually worse and are where most search traffic lands.

The score out of a hundred is a summary. The number to actually fix is how long it takes for something useful to appear.

The four usual causes

One: enormous images

This is the cause most of the time. A photo straight off a phone camera is three to six megabytes, and it gets put on the page at that size and then shrunk by the browser. Your visitor downloads all of it anyway. Ten of those on a home page is thirty megabytes for a page that should weigh under one.

This one you can fix yourself. Resize images to roughly the size they are displayed, save them as WebP, and put them back. It is often the difference between a failing score and a good one.

Two: too many scripts

Chat widgets, popups, analytics, a second analytics somebody added and forgot, review widgets, font loaders, tracking pixels for ads you stopped running. Each one is a separate download and some of them block the page from appearing at all. Remove anything you cannot name a use for.

Three: heavy page builders and plugin stacks

A drag and drop builder ships the machinery for everything it can do, whether you used it or not, and every plugin adds its own stylesheet and script. A site with thirty plugins is slow before you have written a word, and no amount of caching fully fixes it.

Four: cheap hosting, sometimes

Shared hosting on the other side of the world adds real delay before your page even starts to load. It matters, but it is fourth on this list for a reason: it is usually blamed first and is usually not the main problem. Fix the images before you change host.

What it actually costs

People leave. Not dramatically, and you will never see it in an enquiry count, because the ones who left never contacted you. On a phone on mobile data, a page that takes six seconds loses a meaningful share of the people who asked for it, and those are people who were interested enough to click.

Google also uses page experience as one signal among many. It will not lift a bad page above a great one, but between two similar businesses it is a thumb on the scale, and it is a thumb you control.

What good looks like

• →Something meaningful on screen in under two and a half seconds on mobile data.
• →A home page that weighs under about one megabyte in total.
• →Text that appears immediately rather than after the font downloads.
• →Nothing jumping around as images load in underneath what you were reading.

Why we build the way we do

We build static sites: the pages are generated once and served as finished files, with no database call and no plugin stack between a visitor and the page. That is why they load quickly, and it is also why there is no WordPress style admin panel unless you pay for one. That trade off is a real cost, and speed is what you get for it.

Run this site through PageSpeed Insights on mobile if you want to check we mean it. That is a fairer test than anything we could write here.