How fast is your website, really?

Speed tests throw a lot of abbreviations at you. Only a handful matter for a business website, and each one describes something a visitor actually feels.

• Performance score (0 to 100). Google's overall grade for speed. Above 90 is good, 50 to 90 is average, under 50 is slow. The mobile score is the one that counts, because it is measured on a mid-range phone on a normal mobile connection.
• Main content (LCP). How long until the largest element at the top of the page, usually the big image or the headline, is visible. Google wants it under 2.5 seconds.
• Stability (CLS). Whether things move around while the page loads. When a button jumps just as someone taps it, they end up on the wrong page. Under 0.1 is good.
• Blocking (TBT). How long scripts keep the page busy, so it does not react to taps. Under 200 ms feels instant.
• Page weight. How much a visitor downloads to see the page. Over 2 MB is noticeable on mobile data, over 4 MB is a problem.

The usual culprits

On most slow business websites we see the same five things again and again.

1. Huge images. A photo straight from a phone weighs 4 to 8 MB. Resized to the size it is shown at and saved as WebP, it weighs 100 to 300 KB and looks the same.
2. Too many plugins and scripts. Every chat widget, pixel, slider and social feed adds code the phone has to download and run before the page responds.
3. A heavy theme or page builder. Themes that can do everything load everything, on every page, even what you never use.
4. Cheap shared hosting. If the server takes more than a second to answer, everything else starts late.
5. No caching. If every visit rebuilds the page from scratch, the server works hard for nothing. A free service such as Cloudflare, set up properly, solves a big part of it.

Does speed really affect sales?

Yes, in two ways. Google uses speed on mobile as one of the signals for where you rank, so a slow site is harder to find. And people who do find it leave when they wait: the longer the first screen takes, the more of them go back to the search results and click on the next business.

A fast site is not a luxury for large companies. For a small business with a few dozen visitors a day, every visitor who stays is a potential phone call.

What to do with the results

Start with the biggest problem in the report. Often it is one or two oversized images and it takes ten minutes. If the score is still low after that, the cause is usually the theme, the plugins or the hosting, and that is where it is worth asking someone who builds sites for a living. If you want us to look at it, our maintenance plans include speed work, and if the site is too far gone, a new website built from scratch usually scores above 90 from day one.