the site that loads slow loses the call before it rings.

The person with water on the floor does not wait for your slideshow to load, and Google notices when they leave.

Hi,

Picture the person who needs you most. Water on the kitchen floor, a car that will not start, a tooth that hurts. They pull out their phone, search, and tap the first name that looks right. Your site starts to load. A white screen. A spinning circle. A logo that appears and then jumps as the rest of the page shoves it down. They tap back and try the next name.

That is the whole lesson. A slow site does not lose the sale on the page. It loses the sale before the page exists. And it loses twice, because Google sees the person come back to the results and try someone else, and it reads that as a vote against you. Let that happen enough and the ranking you worked for starts to slip.

Here is how to check yourself, and it is not a tool. Take your phone, turn off the wifi so you are on mobile data, and open your own website. Count in your head. If you had time to get bored, so does your customer. Then do the same with the three businesses above you on Google. If theirs appear before yours does, you have found part of the reason they are above you.

Say you run a landscaping company and your home page opens with a slideshow of your best work. A dozen big photos, straight off the camera, each one the size of a small movie. On the office computer it looks great. On a phone in a driveway it is a white screen for as long as it takes the customer to give up. The photos were supposed to sell the work. Instead nobody sees them.

The fixes are almost always the same few. Shrink the photos before they go on the site, a phone screen does not need a picture wider than the phone. Take the slideshow off the home page and use one good photo. Remove the plugins and widgets that were added over the years and forgotten. Use one font, not four. And if your site was built on a platform that loads a chat bubble, a pop up, a cookie banner and a video before it shows the button to call, that is the platform's speed, not yours, and it may be time to move.

None of this is about being fancy. A plain page that loads instantly beats a beautiful one that loads eventually, because the customer only ever sees the one that loads.

Speed is one of the first things I check when I take on a site, next to the title tag and the button to call. The full list of what I look at is on my website optimization page. If you do only one thing this week, shrink the photos. It is boring and it works.

Talk soon,
Brandon

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