This week I opened my own website in two browsers on my laptop. In one it appeared quickly. In the other it took long enough that I noticed, and I do this for a living.
My first reaction was to blame the browser. I was wrong, and the way I was wrong is the most useful part of this post, because it is the mistake almost every business owner makes when they check their own site.
First, test it fairly
I timed the same page three times in a row. It took about one second, then about seven, then about fifteen. The page had not changed. The server answered in a fifth of a second every time. What had changed was my Wi-Fi: someone in the house was downloading a video game.
The other problem was that one browser had already visited my site and stored the images and videos. The other had never seen it, so it had to download everything from scratch. That is not a slow website. That is a first visit compared with a repeat visit.
Here is how to test properly:
- Use a private window. Ctrl+Shift+N in Chrome, Ctrl+Shift+P in Edge. It starts with nothing stored, which is what a new customer gets.
- Test on mobile data, not your home Wi-Fi. Most people looking for a local business are on their phone, often with a weaker signal than you have at your desk.
- Test twice and compare. The first visit is what a new customer sees. The second shows whether your site stores its files properly.
- Slow the connection on purpose. In Chrome or Edge press F12, then Ctrl+Shift+M for the phone view, and set the network to Slow 4G. This shows you the weak signal your customers sometimes have.
- Use a neutral tester. Google's free PageSpeed Insights at pagespeed.web.dev tests from Google's servers, so nobody downloading a game can affect it.
What usually makes a small business site slow
In my experience it is almost always one of these, roughly in order of how often:
- Photos that are far too big. A photo straight off a phone can be several megabytes. On a page it is shown at a fraction of that size, so the visitor downloads detail they never see.
- Video that downloads before anyone wants it. A background video at the bottom of a page should not start downloading while someone is still reading the top.
- Files downloaded again on every visit. A site can tell the browser to keep its images for a day, or a week. If it does not, every visit starts from nothing.
- Lots of outside services. Fonts, chat boxes, booking widgets, maps, analytics. Each one is another request to someone else's server, and one slow one can hold the page up.
- A heavy page builder or a pile of plugins. Not always, but it is worth asking how much code is being sent to a phone to show a simple page.
What I changed on my own site
Once I tested fairly, the real problems were the ones on that list, and they were mine. Three things:
- Three background videos totalled about 2.4MB. I had compressed versions ready that I had never actually published. They now total about 1.3MB, and they look identical on a phone.
- Each video only started downloading when you were almost on top of it. They now start downloading about two screens early, so they are ready when you arrive.
- I had told browsers to re-check every image and video on every visit. They are now kept for a day.
I also removed two of those videos entirely and replaced them with a real photo and a short write-up. It was lighter, and it said more. I wrote about the same idea in why your best 25 photos beat all 80.
What you can check in five minutes
- Open your site in a private window on your phone, on mobile data. Scroll slowly. If images pop in late or the page jumps around, that is worth fixing.
- Run it through PageSpeed Insights and read the list of suggestions, not just the score. A score is a number. A suggestion such as "serve images in a smaller size" is a task.
- Ask whoever looks after your site three questions: are the images compressed and sized for the screen, do the videos wait until they are needed, and are the files stored by the browser between visits.
If you do not have a web person, those same three questions are a good test of whether you have the right one.
One honest limit
You cannot fix a customer's weak signal. What you control is how much your page asks their phone to download. Keep that small and it loads acceptably on a bad connection, and quickly on a good one.
It is also not worth chasing a perfect score. Google does use how a page feels as one signal among many, but the bigger effect is simpler: a visitor on a phone who waits too long goes back to the search results and picks the next business. A plain, light site, like the one I built for my dad's business, does not have this problem in the first place.
If you are not sure whether your own site is slow for the right reasons, the Process page explains how I build and check a site before it goes live, and the post on whether Google can even see your site is a good next read.