Page Speed

Page speed is how long a person waits before your page is worth looking at. It is not the number on the office computer. It is what happens on a three-year-old phone, on mobile data, standing at a bus stop. That is the visit you are trying to keep.

Google watches three things and calls them Core Web Vitals. The first is how long until the biggest thing on the screen finally appears, usually the main photo or the headline. The second is how fast the page answers when a finger taps something. The third is whether the page jumps while you are reading, so your thumb lands on the wrong button. Anybody who has tried to tap a link and hit an advert instead has met the third one.

Two culprits explain most slow pages, and images come first. A photo straight off a phone camera can weigh four megabytes. Upload forty of them and you have built a page nobody on mobile data will wait for. The same photo saved properly is often under two hundred kilobytes and looks identical on screen. When Linkysoft looks at a slow shop site, the photos alone usually explain the first half of the delay.

The second culprit is where the site lives. Cheap shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one machine, so when a neighbour gets busy your pages slow down, and nothing you did caused it. Moving to a server with its own guaranteed share, such as Hostrena, often takes half a second off before anyone touches a line of code.

Here is the part that surprises owners. Speed is not one number for the whole site. A homepage can be quick while the checkout crawls, and the checkout is the page that pays. Measure the pages that carry money first. And measure them on a phone over a normal mobile connection, because a test on office wifi will only tell you the comfortable answer.

The cheapest speed decisions are made before anything is built. How many fonts. Whether every page loads a picture slider it does not need. How many outside scripts sit at the top. Linkysoft sets a speed target at the start of a web application project and again for a new website, because trimming later is slower and dearer than choosing well now. A page that answers in under two seconds keeps people who would otherwise be gone.