Why a slow mobile site costs you customers

Most people looking for a local business are on their phone. Often on mobile data, often stood in a kitchen with a leak or sat in a car park between jobs. If your website takes too long to load, they hit back and tap the next result. You never even know they were there. No missed call, no email, nothing in your diary. Just work that quietly went somewhere else.

Speed is one of the first things I check on any new client’s site, and it’s one of the most common problems I find. The good news is that most slow sites can be fixed without starting again. Here’s what slows them down and what I do about it.

How fast should a website load on a phone?

The main content should appear within about two and a half seconds. That’s the line Google uses for a page it considers good. Under two seconds is better. Anything over four and you’re losing a noticeable share of visitors before they’ve read a word.

Remember that your phone on the office wifi isn’t a fair test. Try it on mobile data, ideally outside town. Most of your customers won’t be on a fast connection when they find you.

Does website speed affect Google rankings?

Yes, though it’s one factor among many. Google measures how quickly your pages load, how soon they respond when tapped and whether things jump about while loading. It calls these Core Web Vitals. A slow site won’t sink you on its own, but when two businesses are close, the faster one tends to win.

The bigger effect is on people. A slow site loses visitors before they enquire, and Google notices when people bounce straight back to the results. You can see your own numbers in Search Console. If that’s not set up, my Search Console setup sorts it.

Why are images the usual culprit?

Because people upload photos straight from their phone or camera. A single photo can be several megabytes, sized for a billboard, when it only needs to fill a space a few hundred pixels wide. Put ten of those on a gallery page and the phone has to download a small film’s worth of data before anything appears.

The fix is to resize images to the size they’re actually shown at and save them in a modern format like WebP. That alone often cuts page weight by more than half. I recently shrank a photo on this very site from about 2MB to 12KB with no visible difference. Images further down the page should also load only when someone scrolls to them.

Can too many plugins slow a site down?

They can. Every plugin on a WordPress site can add its own code to every page, even pages that don’t use it. Sliders, pop-ups, social feeds, chat widgets and tracking scripts all add up. I often find sites running thirty or forty plugins, a third of which do nothing useful any more.

Going through them, removing the dead ones and replacing heavy ones with lighter alternatives is part of my SEO fixes. Keeping them updated afterwards is part of website management.

Do page builders make sites slower?

Some do, quite a lot. Drag and drop builders make it easy to design a page, but many of them load a heavy pile of code to do it. A simple page of text and a couple of photos can end up weighing as much as a complicated web app.

That’s why the sites I build use lean code rather than heavy builders. If you’re thinking about a new site, it’s worth asking any designer what they build with and how fast their sites load on a phone. I’ve put together a list of questions to ask a web design company that covers it.

Does cheap hosting make a difference?

It often does. Bargain hosting usually means your site shares a crowded server with thousands of others, sometimes in another country. When those other sites get busy, yours slows down. The server’s first response can take a second or more before anything starts loading.

I host client sites with Hostinger on dedicated UK servers, backed up every hour. It’s quick for UK visitors and there’s a real person to ring if anything goes wrong. More on that on my website hosting page.

How can you test your own website’s speed?

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is free and simple. Type in your web address and it gives you a score for mobile and desktop, plus a list of what’s slowing things down. Look at the mobile score first, because that’s what most of your customers see. Don’t panic about getting a perfect 100. Aim for the green, and focus on how quickly the main content appears.

Then do the real test. Open your site on your own phone using mobile data and time how long it takes before you could tap the phone number. If you’re drumming your fingers, so are your customers.

Should you fix your site or start again?

Usually fix it. Most speed problems come down to images, plugins and hosting, and all three can be sorted on an existing site. A rebuild only makes sense when the site is built on something so heavy or old that fixing it costs more than replacing it. I’ll tell you honestly which side of that line you’re on.

If a new site is the right call, it needs planning so you don’t lose your rankings in the move. My website redesign SEO checklist walks through it, and website development covers how I build.

Questions people ask me

Keep reading

Once your site is quick, the next job is making sure visitors get in touch. How to turn website visitors into enquiries covers that. On-page SEO basics explains what Google needs from each page, and what I check in a free SEO audit shows the full list I go through.

Hi, I’m Pete

Want a faster website?

Email, call or WhatsApp me your web address. I’ll test it on a phone and tell you what’s slowing it down.

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