Why your website is slow on a phone — and five fixes that work

Most of your visitors arrive on a phone, often on mobile data. If the page takes more than a few seconds, many of them leave. Here are the usual causes and what to do about each.

Open your own website on your phone, on mobile data, not office Wi-Fi. Count the seconds until you can read the first line. If it feels slow to you, it feels slower to a customer who does not know you yet.

Speed matters twice: people leave slow pages, and Google takes page experience into account when it decides what to show.

Five common causes, and the fix

• Huge images. Photos uploaded straight from a camera can be several megabytes each. Resize them and use a modern format such as WebP.
• Too many plugins and scripts. Every chat widget, tracker and slider adds weight. Remove what you do not use.
• A heavy template. Many themes load features for every possible site. A site built for your needs carries only what it uses.
• Slow hosting. Cheap shared hosting far from your customers adds delay to every page. Choose hosting suited to the region.
• Nothing is cached. Without caching, the server rebuilds every page for every visitor. Turn caching on.

Check it properly

Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool will test any page and list what is slowing it down. Test your home page and your most important service page, and fix the biggest items first.

When to rebuild instead

If the site is built on an old, heavy template, small fixes may only get you so far. A rebuild designed mobile-first is often cheaper in the long run than patching a site that was never meant to be fast.

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