Most websites get checked the wrong way: from the office computer, on fibre, with the page already cached in the browser. Anything flies like that. The real test is different: take your phone, turn off the wifi and open it in an incognito window. If three seconds in you are still looking at a white screen, you have a slow website on mobile, and that gets paid for in calls that never come.
"Slow" is not a feeling, it is a number
One measurement sums up what a person actually perceives: how long the biggest element on the screen takes to paint —the hero image, the headline or the main block—. Google calls it LCP and it is part of the Core Web Vitals, the metrics it uses to assess page experience.
You do not need to be technical to see it. Put your address into PageSpeed Insights, pick the mobile tab and it gives you the number plus a list of what is in the way. It is free and takes less time than a coffee.
What really slows a site down (and it is rarely "the server")
When we review sites for new clients, the same pattern comes up. These five things explain most cases.
Photos uploaded straight from the camera
Number one by a distance. A modern phone photo weighs three to six megabytes and is six thousand pixels wide; on the site it displays at one thousand. The browser downloads the whole original just to show it small. With ten photos like that, your homepage weighs more than a short film. The fix is not removing photos: it is serving them at their real size and in modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, which weigh half or less with no visible difference.
The template that comes with everything
Plenty of sites are built on a commercial theme designed to sell to everyone: carousels, animations, galleries, shops, bookings. Even if you use almost none of it, the browser downloads the entire machinery. It is like driving around with a full boot all year in case you move house one day.
Third-party scripts
The chat widget, the embedded map, the ad pixel, the cookie notice, the review bar and the video player. Each brings its own code and its own connection. Alone they are harmless; together they add a good two seconds and, on top of that, they load before your content.
Background video and fonts
A twelve-megabyte hero video looks gorgeous in the pitch and is a disaster on patchy coverage. And every extra typeface means two or three more files blocking your text until they arrive.
The two-euro hosting
Here the server does matter: if the machine is shared with hundreds of sites, time to first response goes through the roof and everything else arrives late. You do not need expensive hosting, you need hosting that answers. In our plans, high-performance hosting is included, precisely so this is not a monthly argument.
Why everything is worse on mobile
The same page that takes one second on your computer can take five on a phone, and it is not the phone's fault. Three things stack up: real coverage out in the street or the metro, which is not your wifi; a processor that takes longer to interpret the code; and a person in a hurry, standing up, with one hand busy.
That is the situation where most calls to a local business are decided. If your site only ever gets tested on a desktop, you are looking at the version almost nobody uses.
What we usually find when we open a site for the first time
When a business sends us their address to take a look, the diagnosis repeats itself so often it is almost predictable. These are the four usual findings, in order of frequency.
- The homepage weighs between eight and fifteen megabytes and 80 % of that is photos displayed at a third of their real size. Simply converting them recovers half the loading time.
- There are plugins installed that nobody uses any more. A gallery tried once, a form that got replaced, a translator removed from the site but not from the server.
- The cookie notice loads before the content. The first thing a visitor sees is a grey banner over an empty background, and then they have to dismiss it.
- Nobody has measured since launch. The site was delivered fast three years ago and has been putting on weight with every photo and every add-on.
None of these four is serious on its own. The problem is that they add up, and the one left waiting is always the same person: the customer who was about to call you.
What changes once it is fixed
Let us be honest: speed alone will not take you to the top of Google. What it does is remove a brake. You notice it in two places: the people who already reached your site and left before seeing anything, and the pages that were competing neck and neck with others, where experience ends up breaking the tie.
If your actual problem is not showing up at all, that is a different conversation: we cover it in why your website doesn't appear on Google, and it is solved with SEO work, not with image optimisation.
The two-minute check
- On mobile data. Turn off wifi, open an incognito window and type your domain. Count until you can tap the phone number.
- With the tool. Run your homepage and one service page through PageSpeed Insights, on the mobile tab.
- Against the competition. Do the same with two businesses that rank above you. It is the best thermometer there is, better than any score out of a hundred.
Want to know what it would cost you?
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
What gets fixed in an afternoon and what needs rebuilding
Not everything costs the same. There are usually two clearly separate groups.
- Quick: compressing and converting images, removing scripts nobody uses any more, enabling caching and compression, loading fonts differently and deleting dead plugins. This is where most of the lost time comes back.
- Structural: replacing a heavy template, reordering the page so the important part loads first, or moving the hosting. That is real work, which is why it belongs in a redesign rather than mid-season.
A warning from experience: the plugin that promises to fix everything with one button sometimes breaks the layout or leaves the contact form silently failing. If you install one, check the whole site afterwards, not just the homepage.
What it costs to have a fast website
Our prices are published, and hosting and maintenance are part of them:
- Your Landing, €100 a month: one page, high-performance hosting, one mailbox on your domain and maintenance included.
- Your Website, €200 a month: up to ten subpages, two mailboxes, one article a month and maintenance.
- Digital presence, from €400 a month: all of the above plus content, Google listing, answered reviews and campaigns.
VAT not included, no lock-in, and website and email migration included, so switching provider has no entry cost. In what website maintenance covers you have the detail of what gets checked every month, and in how much a website costs, why two similar-looking quotes may not be.
We work from Palamós with businesses in Girona and Barcelona
Our office is in Palamós and we run websites for businesses across both provinces. This part of the job —measure, compress, clean up and measure again— works just as well remotely, and small changes get done the same day instead of waiting for a visit.
If you want to know where yours stands, message us on WhatsApp with your web address. We will open it on mobile data, tell you what is holding it back and how much of that can be fixed without touching the design. No strings attached, same day.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.