Page Speed

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

Google watches three things here and calls them Core Web Vitals. The first is how long the biggest thing on screen takes to appear, usually the main photo or the headline. The second is how fast the page answers when a finger taps something, and the third is whether the page jumps while you read, so your thumb lands on the wrong button. Anyone who has aimed at a link and hit an advert has met that third one.

Two things explain most slow pages, and images come first. A photo straight off a phone camera can weigh four megabytes, so forty of them build a page nobody on mobile data will wait for. Saved properly, the same photo is often under two hundred kilobytes and looks identical on screen. That is why, when Linkysoft checks a slow shop site, the photos alone explain the first half of the delay.

The second thing is where the site lives, because cheap shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one machine. When a neighbour there gets busy your pages slow down, and nothing you did caused it. So the fix is often not in your code, because moving to a server with its own guaranteed share, such as Hostrena, saves half a second before anyone edits a line.

The part that surprises owners is that 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. So measure the pages that carry money first, on a phone over normal mobile data, because office wifi only tells you the comfortable answer.

The cheapest speed decisions get made before anything is built. That is when you choose how many fonts load, whether every page carries a picture slider nobody asked for, and how many outside scripts sit up top. So 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.