Is your website fast enough for a phone in the car park?

Picture your typical customer. They're probably not sitting at a desk with fast broadband. They're on a phone, in a car park or on a sidewalk, with two bars of signal, trying to find your opening hours before they decide where to go.

If your site takes eight seconds to load, they've already tapped on a competitor.

Five quick checks

You don't need special tools to get a rough idea of how your site performs:

1. Load it on your phone with Wi-Fi switched off. Count how long it takes before you can read something useful.
2. Run a free speed test. Google's PageSpeed Insights gives a score and a list of the biggest problems.
3. Look at your images. Photos straight from a camera can be 5MB or more each. On the web, most should be well under 300KB.
4. Count the extras. Chat widgets, social media feeds, pop-ups and tracking scripts all add weight.
5. Check the important stuff is near the top. Phone number, address and hours shouldn't need three scrolls to find.

What hosting has to do with it

Some speed problems live in the website itself, like oversized images or too many plugins. But a lot depend on where it's hosted:

• Server response time. An overloaded shared server can take a second or more just to start sending the page.
• Caching. Serving a ready-made copy of each page is far quicker than building it from scratch for every visitor.
• A content delivery network (CDN). Copies of your site's files are stored in data centres around the world, so they travel a shorter distance to each visitor.

Every site we host gets caching and a global CDN as standard. If your site still feels slow after moving, we'll take a look and tell you, in plain English, what's holding it back.