Guide
Why your website is slow on mobile
Nearly everyone who finds you on Google is on a phone, and plenty of them are on a weak signal in a car or a kitchen. If your homepage takes six seconds to appear, a good share of those people are gone before they see your number.
Photos are usually the problem
A photo straight off a phone camera can be five or six megabytes. Put ten of them on a homepage and you are asking someone to download the guts of a film before they can read anything.
Resizing images and saving them in a modern format like WebP often cuts the page weight by eighty percent or more with no visible loss.
Too many add ons
Chat widgets, review sliders, booking tools, tracking scripts and fonts all load separately. Each one on its own seems harmless. Together they bring a phone to a crawl.
Keep what earns its place and remove the rest. Most sites have at least two things nobody has ever used.
Cheap hosting shows
If the server takes a second to even start responding, nothing you do on the page will fix it. Shared hosting bought on price is a common culprit.
Hosting is included in our monthly plan precisely because it is not something a customer should have to think about.
What to fix first
In order of impact for most trade sites.
- Compress and resize every image
- Load below the fold images only when needed
- Remove unused scripts and widgets
- Move to decent hosting
- Keep the homepage simple above the fold
How to check
Open your site on your own phone, off wifi, and count. If your number is not visible and tappable within three seconds you have work to do.
Google publishes free speed tools, but the phone in your pocket is the test that matters.
Common questions
Does site speed affect Google rankings?
It is one of the signals Google uses, and it strongly affects whether people stay long enough to ring you.
How fast should a trade website load?
Aim for the main content appearing within about two to three seconds on a normal mobile connection.
Where to go next
Want us to sort this for you?
We build the site for free and look after the hosting, the updates and the local SEO for €59.99 a month on a 12 month minimum. Have a chat with us and see if it suits.
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- How to Write a Service Page That ConvertsThe order you say things in matters as much as what you say.
- Contact Forms That Actually Get UsedMost forms ask too much and get ignored. Here is what works.