To find out whether your website is slow, enter its address in PageSpeed Insights, Google’s free tool, and look at the result for phones. Under 50, your website drives customers away before it has even shown its first image.
Simon FortinFounder of JustSimpleWeb
At the office, your website opens in the blink of an eye.
Your customer opens it in their truck, on their phone, with two bars of signal.
Fast at your place
You’ve checked your website. On your computer, on the office internet, everything shows up right away. You’ve never had a reason to doubt it.
Except your computer has been keeping your website in memory for months. It barely loads it anymore: it remembers it.
Your customer is seeing it for the first time. On a phone, often outdoors.
What your customer sees
They clicked on your name in Google. The screen stays white. Then the menu appears, but not the photo. Then the page jumps when the image finally arrives, and they tap the wrong spot.
They don’t tell themselves “this website is slow.” They go back and click the result below.
You’ll never know. They didn’t write to you, they didn’t call. They went to someone else.
The 30-second test
- Go to pagespeed.web.dev. It’s Google’s free tool.
- Enter your website’s address and click “Analyze.”
- Stay on the Mobile tab. It’s the one that counts.
You get a score out of 100:
- 90 and above, in green: your website is fast.
- 50 to 89, in orange: there’s work to do, but nothing urgent.
- Under 50, in red: visitors leave before they’ve seen your page.
Look at the “Largest Contentful Paint” line too. It’s the time before the main element of the page appears. Google considers it good under 2.5 seconds.
What almost always slows things down
In most slow websites, the same culprits come back:
- photos that are too heavy, uploaded as is from a phone or a camera;
- a video at the top of the page, which loads before everything else;
- apps added one at a time: chat, booking, social media, reviews. Each one adds its weight;
- a template that loads everything, even the sections you don’t use.
None of these can be seen with the naked eye. That’s why the test exists.
Fast at their place
A fast website is one that shows up quickly at your customer’s, not at yours. That’s what Google measures, and it’s what decides whether they stay on your page.
You ran the test and the number is red? We can look together at what’s slowing it down.