How fast should your website be?
Faster than it probably is. And faster than most people building websites seem to care about.
Here’s the short version: your website should feel instant on a phone, on a normal connection, standing in a car park with two bars of signal. If it doesn’t, you’re losing people before they’ve read a word, and Google’s quietly holding you back too.
Why speed is two problems, not one
A slow website costs you in two places at once, which is why it matters more than it looks.
People leave. Someone taps your link, the screen sits there half-loaded, and they’re gone. Back to Google, on to the next one. They won’t email to say “your site was a bit slow so I went elsewhere.” They just go. You never even know they came.
Google notices. Page speed is one of the things Google actually measures and uses when it decides who to show first. A slow site is fighting the rankings with a hand tied behind its back. So the slow site loses the visitor and loses the position that would have brought the next one.
Same problem, hitting you twice.
What “fast enough” actually means
You don’t need a stopwatch. On a phone, your page should be useful in a couple of seconds. The main thing, your headline, your photo, your “what we do and how to ring you,” should be there almost straight away, not after a spinner and a lurch as everything jumps into place.
If people have time to think “come on then” while it loads, it’s too slow.
What makes sites slow (and it’s usually the same three things)
- Heavy, unoptimised images. A photo straight off a phone can be five thousand pixels wide and several megabytes. Serve twenty of those and you’ve built an anchor. Sized and compressed properly, the same photos load in a blink.
- Plugin bloat. The classic WordPress site with thirty plugins all loading their own scripts on every page (I wrote about that treadmill here). Each one’s a little bit of drag, and it adds up fast.
- Cheap, slow hosting. The shared bargain hosting that’s fine until anyone actually visits. You get what you pay for, and sometimes you get less.
None of these are clever to fix. They’re just the boring bits most builders skip.
Check yours, for free, right now
You don’t need me to tell you if you’ve got a problem. Google will, for nothing.
- Search for “PageSpeed Insights,” put your web address in, and run it on mobile. It gives you a score out of 100 and a plain list of what’s slowing you down.
- If you’re in the red, don’t panic. The biggest quick win is nearly always the images, and that’s a fixable afternoon, not a rebuild.
I measure this in every audit I do, scored out of 100, on a real phone, because it’s one of those things that’s invisible until you look and obvious once you have.
Fast isn’t a luxury or a nice extra. It’s the floor. A site that loads properly is just doing the basic job you paid it to do, which is to still be there when someone’s ready to get in touch.
Want to know your number? I’ll measure your speed and tell you what’s dragging it down. Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.