Think about the last time you looked for a restaurant on your phone. You tapped a result, the page stayed blank, and you went back and tapped the next one. You didn’t think twice.
Your customers do the same with your website.
Three seconds
In 2016, Google measured how long people wait on their phones. More than half of mobile visits, 53%, were abandoned if the page took longer than three seconds to load. The study is a few years old, but nobody has grown more patient since.
In the Ribeira Sacra there’s one more thing: signal comes and goes. Someone looking for lunch from a road in the Sil canyon doesn’t have fiber. They have one bar of 4G, and every extra kilobyte on your site shows.
Google measures it too
Speed doesn’t only put people off. Google measures how pages load and takes it into account when it ranks results. Between two similar sites, the fast one has the edge.
The measure that matters most is how long the main part of the page takes to appear: the big photo or the first block of text. Google counts under 2.5 seconds as good.
Test your site in two minutes
- Go to pagespeed.web.dev.
- Type in your website’s address and press “Analyze”.
- Look at the “Mobile” tab, not desktop. That’s the one that counts.
- Check the “Performance” number. 90–100 shows green, 50–89 orange, and anything under 50 red.
Run it two or three times, because the score shifts a little each time.
For comparison: the sites I’ve made score between 99 and 100 for performance on mobile. You can check one yourself with rizoma.gal.
Why so many websites are slow
- The server puts together every page. With WordPress, each visit makes the server query the database and put the pieces together. I explained this in what a website really costs.
- Page builders load too much. They ship code for everything they could do, not just what you use.
- The photos are huge. One full-size phone photo can weigh more than the rest of the site put together.
- Every plugin adds its own code, even if you only use it on one page.
- Cheap shared hosting really is shared. Your site splits a server with hundreds of others.
- The fonts come from somewhere else. Many sites load their typefaces from Google Fonts, so the browser has to connect to another server before it can draw any text.
It happened to one of my own sites, linguastecidas.es. It scored 90 on mobile, and the main content took 2.9 seconds to appear. The cause was a single font loading from Google Fonts. I moved it onto the site itself, and the score went to 100, with the main content on screen in 1.4 seconds. Nothing else on the page changed.
What you can do
If your site comes out orange or red, some fixes don’t mean starting over: shrink the photos, remove plugins you don’t use, serve fonts from your own site, and turn on caching.
If it’s still red after all that, the problem is usually in the foundations. That’s where a static site changes things at the root: the pages are already made, they’re light, and they’re served from a server close to whoever is visiting.
If you like, run the test and send me the result. I’ll tell you what’s slowing your site down.