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Why your website is slow on a phone

When it breaks 6 min read

What actually makes a small business website slow on a phone, how to test it honestly on your own mobile data, and the four things worth cutting first.

Somebody typed what you do into their phone, tapped your name, and then stood there watching a white screen with half a logo on it. You have done this yourself, in a parking lot, with one bar of signal. You do not wait. You go back and tap the next one.

Speed is the one website problem you can check without buying anything or asking anybody, because the equipment is already in your pocket.

What slow actually looks like from the outside

A slow site is not a broken site, which is why nobody tells you about it. It loads eventually. The trouble is what happens in between.

First a blank screen. Then text with no shape to it. Then the photographs land one at a time and shove everything down the page, so the phone number that was under somebody's thumb a second ago has moved, and they have tapped a picture of a truck instead. Then a chat bubble slides up over the corner.

The person who gives up in the middle of that never contacts you, so all you notice is a week that was quieter than the last one.

Test it the way a customer would

Turn the wifi off. You want mobile data, because that is what a customer standing outside your job site is on. Open a private or incognito tab, so your phone is not handing you a stored copy of your own website and making it look faster than it is.

Now go to the page people actually arrive on. That is usually not your home page, because search tends to drop people straight onto a service page.

Count in your head while it comes up, without bothering to write a number down. Watch for the moment your business name and phone number are readable, and whether the page keeps moving after that.

Then hand your phone to somebody with an older cheap Android and ask them to do the same. Your new phone on a good connection is not the average customer.

The photographs are nearly always the problem

A photo taken on a modern phone is enormous. It is built to be printed, and it is being sent to a screen the width of a playing card. When one goes onto a website straight off the camera roll, the visitor downloads all of it and their browser shrinks it afterwards, on their data.

Twelve of those on a gallery page is the most common reason a small business site crawls.

Keep the photographs, because photos of your actual work are one of the few things on your site that do any real convincing. The fix is that each one is resized and saved in a modern format before it goes on the page, and that the ones further down only load when somebody scrolls to them. Some site builders do a version of this on their own. Some do not, and there is no way to tell by looking.

What else loads before your phone number does

Nothing on this list was a bad decision at the time. Each one arrived on its own, months apart, and seemed small.

The rotating banner at the top showing three photos nobody stays for. A video playing silently behind the header. Four different fonts, each fetched from somewhere else. A chat widget. A reviews carousel pulled live from another company's server. A map embed. And the tracking: analytics, an ads pixel, a heat map tool somebody trialed two years ago and never removed, and a tag manager loading all of them again.

Every one is a separate request to a separate company, and your page waits its turn behind them. The chat widget is often the heaviest thing on a trades website, and it is answering nobody.

Where the site lives matters as much as what is on it

Hosting is the other half of this. A cheap plan usually means your site shares one machine with a great many other sites, and when one of them has a busy morning, yours is the one that hesitates. A server physically far away adds a delay to every request. And a site with no caching rebuilds every page from scratch for every visitor, including the pages that have not changed since March.

Good hosting costs money, though not much for a small local site, and it is the fix that asks nothing of you afterwards.

What to cut first

Work down this in order and stop when the site feels right.

Two things that are not worth your money

Do not buy a speed plugin to fix a speed problem. It is another layer of software loading on top of the software you already have, and it usually caches the mess rather than removing it.

Do not chase a perfect score on a testing tool either. Those tools find what is heavy and are a poor judge of whether your site works. A page that scores middling and shows your phone number right away beats one tuned to a high score with the number three scrolls down.

And if your site is a handful of plain pages that come up before you finish counting to three, you are done. You do not need to pay anyone for this, including us.

What it looks like when it is right

Your name, what you do, the area you cover and a phone number, readable almost immediately, on mobile data, on an old phone. Nothing jumping around after it appears. Photographs filling in a moment later, which is fine, because by then the person knows they are in the right place.

Nothing has to be instant, as long as it arrives before the decision to go back.

Questions people ask

How fast should my website load on a phone?

Fast enough that somebody standing outside on mobile data sees your name and number without deciding whether to wait. If you find yourself waiting on your own site, that is your answer.

Does a slow website hurt my Google ranking?

Speed is one of the things search engines measure, so it counts for something. Treat it as a reason rather than the reason, because the visitor giving up is what costs you the job today.

Will fewer photos make my site faster?

Smaller photos will. Resizing them before they go on the page does far more than deleting them, and your work photos are worth keeping.

Why is my site fast on my computer and slow on my phone?

Your computer has a bigger connection, more memory, and a stored copy of your own site. The phone on mobile data is doing all of it fresh, over the air.

Is expensive hosting worth it for a small business site?

Better hosting is worth paying for. The top tier of anything usually is not, for a site this size. You are buying a machine that is not overcrowded, not one built for a shopping platform.

My site got slower and I did not change anything. Why?

Something else did. An add-on updated, a script your site loads from another company got heavier, or the host moved you. That is normal, and it is not something you were supposed to be watching for.

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