How fast does your website load on a phone?
Most of your customers find you on a phone, often on one bar of signal. Put in your website, and a competitor’s if you like, and Google’s own test shows how long people wait. It takes about thirty seconds.
Running Google’s test on a simulated phone. This usually takes 20 to 40 seconds, because it really loads each site from scratch.
Want this in plain English, with a plan?
I’ll look at what’s actually slowing your site down, what it’s costing you, and what I’d fix first, then send it over or walk you through it on a call. Free, and it comes from me.
What the numbers mean
- Speed score. Google’s 0 to 100 grade for a phone. 90 and up is good, 50 to 89 needs work, under 50 is poor.
- Shows up in. Seconds until the main thing on the page appears. Google counts 2.5 seconds or less as good and anything over 4 as poor.
- Page weight. How much a phone has to download. Big photos straight off a camera are the usual reason a page is heavy.
- Search basics and accessibility. Whether Google can read the page properly, and whether everybody can use it, including people with poor eyesight.
Rather have a person look at the whole site, not just its speed? The free website check covers your phone layout, what you rank for, your Google profile and why visitors aren’t calling.
About the speed test
It is Google’s own PageSpeed test, run on a simulated mid-range phone on a slow mobile connection. That is deliberately harsher than your office Wi-Fi, because it is closer to a customer in a parking lot with one bar of signal.
Each run loads your site fresh over a real network, so a few points either way is normal. A site that swings by twenty or more points usually has a slow server or something heavy loading from another company’s servers.
It counts, though less than having the right pages and a strong Google profile. Where it really costs you is people. A page that takes five seconds to show on a phone loses visitors before they ever see your phone number.
They go to Google’s test and nowhere else. I get a note that a test ran so I know someone is looking, but no names or numbers unless you choose to send them with the form below the results.