Why a fast website wins you more customers

Before you read any further, go and do this. Pick up your phone, turn Wi-Fi off, open your own website in a private window, and count out loud until you can use it.

Whatever number you just said out loud is the real one. On the office desktop, on the office broadband, with your browser holding a saved copy of everything, your site is instant. That version of your site has exactly one visitor: you.

Everybody else meets it the way you just did. Standing in a kitchen with water coming through the ceiling, thumbing through search results for a plumber, one bar of signal. They tap you. They wait. They go back and tap whoever is underneath you. Nothing about this reaches you — no bounced email, no missed call — and it happens at the precise moment someone was ready to pay.

The culprit is sitting in your photo folder

Whatever your number was, the thing inflating it is almost certainly your images. Not the host. Not the builder. Not the visitor's phone.

Cameras — including the one in your pocket — make files sized for printing: several megabytes, a few thousand pixels across. Put one straight onto a web page and the browser shrinks it to fit the screen, but only after downloading every last byte. Your visitor pays full price for quality they will never see.

You don't need a tool to check this. Open the folder you uploaded from and turn on the column that shows file size. Megabytes mean you've found it.

Three fixes, roughly in order of how much they buy you:

• Shrink before you upload, not after. Around 1600 pixels wide covers a normal photo sitting in the body of a page. Squoosh does it free, in the browser, no account needed.
• Photographs want JPEG. PNG is built for logos, screenshots and anything with hard edges. Save a photo as PNG and you have multiplied the file size for nothing anyone can see. If your system offers WebP, better again.
• Have fewer of them. Twelve near-identical shots of the same van is eleven photos of waiting.

Some builders quietly compress uploads for you, some leave them exactly as they came off the camera. The only way to know which one you're on is to measure — which is the second test. And while you're elbow-deep in that folder anyway, it's worth knowing what makes a photo worth keeping: good website photos without a photographer.

The second test: PageSpeed Insights

Google's PageSpeed Insights is free and wants nothing but a web address. Ignore the score at the top — it is a number engineered to be worried about. The value is the list underneath it, which names the specific files holding your page up. On a lot of small business sites, those filenames end in .jpg.

Measure, change one thing, measure again. Otherwise you're redecorating in the dark.

What else you can throw out

Once the photos are dealt with, what's left is usually something a person bolted on years ago that nobody has questioned since.

• The video on the home page. A player hauls in its own pile of code before anyone has pressed play. Unless the video is the reason people come, give it a page of its own.
• Third-party embeds. Maps, social feeds, chat bubbles, review carousels — each is a fresh trip to somebody else's server, and each is a bet that their server is having a good day. Ask what any of them has actually got you in the last six months.
• Add-ons you've stopped using. If your system runs on plugins, don't just deactivate the ones you've abandoned. Delete them.

Fewer parts, less waiting — that's the entire rule. It's a familiar conclusion around here. We arrived at the same place from a completely different direction when we worked out what a small business website actually needs, which turns out to be less than anyone selling websites would like.

Fast isn't only about loading

To the person holding the phone, fast means: I got what I came for immediately. A page that loads in one second and hides your phone number at the bottom is a slow page. They were counting either way.

What you do, where you are, how to reach you — all three visible before anyone scrolls. Our piece on hours and contact details that win customers goes further into that.

Speed does feed into how Google sees a site, and that's usually the reason people give you for caring about it. It's the smaller reason. The bigger one is holding a phone with a thumb on the back button.

Thirty minutes, this week

1. The phone test again, Wi-Fi off — but write the number down this time.
2. Home page through PageSpeed Insights. Read the list, skip the score.
3. Take the three heaviest images off it. Resize to 1600 wide, save as JPEG, re-upload.
4. Phone test again. Compare the two numbers.

For most sites, that is the job finished. If yours is still slow afterwards, you're probably fighting the system rather than your photos, and rebuilding on something plainer starts to make sense. That's rare, though. Usually it really is just the photos.