Why it matters for a small business site
Visitors on phones and patchy connections feel every extra second, and a page that’s still loading gives them a reason to go back to the search results. Speed also feeds into Google’s page experience signals through Core Web Vitals.
How to check yours
- Test your key pages, not just the home page, in PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting.
- Open the site on your own phone over mobile data, not office Wi-Fi.
- Look at what each page loads. Image sizes, fonts and third-party scripts are the usual weight.
What good looks like
The main content appears quickly on a mid-range phone, images are sized for the screen and saved in a modern format (WebP or AVIF), only the fonts you use are loaded, and nothing third-party loads that you don’t need.
Common mistakes
- Uploading photos straight from a camera or phone, several megabytes each.
- Lazy-loading the hero image, which delays the very thing people see first.
- Leftover plugins, trackers and chat widgets from tools you no longer use.
- Testing only on a fast laptop.