Here's a thing we hear a lot: “My site loads fast for me.” And it probably does, on your office Wi-Fi, on a computer that has already visited it a hundred times. Your customers are on a phone, out on a job site or in a parking lot, with one or two bars of signal, seeing your site for the very first time.
That's the visit that counts, and it's often a lot slower than you think.
Why a few seconds matter
Google's own research found that more than half of phone visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. People don't wait. They tap back and pick the next business on the list, and you never even know they were there.
What usually slows a small business site down
- Huge photos. A picture straight off a modern phone can be several times bigger than the whole rest of the page. It looks the same on screen, it just takes far longer to arrive.
- Too many add-ons. Chat bubbles, pop-ups, review widgets, trackers. Each one is small, but every one of them has to load before the page settles down.
- Heavy page builders and themes. Many do-it-yourself builders load everything they could ever need on every page, whether you use it or not.
- Sliders and background videos at the top of the page, which make the first thing your customer sees the slowest thing to load.
- Cheap, crowded hosting, where your site shares a slow computer with hundreds of others.
None of these are your fault. Most sites are built to look good in a design review on a fast computer, not to load fast on a customer's phone.
How to find out how fast yours really is
Don't go by how it feels on your own phone. Your phone has seen the site before and kept parts of it, so it will always feel faster than it is for a new customer.
Our free website check runs your homepage through Google's own phone test, the same one Google uses, and tells you in plain words how many seconds it takes to fully show up. Google's goal is 2.5 seconds or less. It also checks a handful of other things customers notice, like whether your phone number is tappable.
What fixing it looks like
Speed is one of the first things we work on when we build or tune up a site. We shrink every picture to the size it's actually shown at, cut the add-ons that aren't earning their keep, and make sure the top of the page, the part a customer sees first, shows up before anything else.
Our own site scores in the 90s on Google's phone test. We hold every site we build to the same standard.