You redesigned your website. New logo, new colours, new photos. It looks great on your laptop.
Then you open it on your phone over 4G. The hero image takes four seconds to load. The menu appears a second later. The footer pops in and shifts the page down while you're reading.
53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Your redesign cost you thousands. Your page speed cost you customers.
Google measures your speed
Google scores your website on four metrics. Largest Contentful Paint measures how fast the main content appears. First Input Delay tracks how long before a visitor can tap a button. Cumulative Layout Shift counts how much the page jumps around while loading. Time to First Byte records how fast your server responds.
These metrics feed into your Core Web Vitals score. Google uses that score as a ranking factor. A slow site with good content will rank below a fast site with the same content.
You can check your own scores at PageSpeed Insights. Run the test on mobile. Most small business websites score below 50 out of 100.
Where the speed goes
Templates and page builders add code your site does not use. A WordPress theme with 40 features loads all 40 even if you use three. Uncompressed images sized for print get served to a phone screen. Third-party scripts for analytics, chat widgets, and cookie banners each add network requests.
A website we audited last month loaded 4.2MB on the homepage. The same content, rebuilt with optimised images and clean code, loaded at 380KB. Same information. Ten times faster.
Speed is a business metric
A plumber in Peterborough searched "boiler repair near me" on his phone during lunch. Google returned ten results. He tapped the first one. It loaded in 1.2 seconds. He called them.
Your site was result number four. It took 5.8 seconds to load. He pressed back before the page finished rendering.
You lost that job. Not because your work is worse. Because your website is slower.
Fixing it
Image compression is the biggest win. Convert images to WebP format. Set explicit width and height to prevent layout shift. Lazy load images below the fold.
Remove unused JavaScript. If your site loads jQuery, Bootstrap, and three animation libraries, audit whether you use them. Strip what you do not need.
Self-host your fonts. Google Fonts CDN adds a render-blocking request. Loading fonts from your own server with font-display: swap eliminates the flash of invisible text.
Use a framework that code-splits by default. Next.js sends only the JavaScript required for the page the visitor is viewing. A WordPress theme sends everything.
Our scores
burch-studio.co.uk scores 99 on desktop and 94 on mobile for performance. 96 for accessibility. 100 for best practices. 100 for SEO.
Those scores are the result of intentional decisions. WebP images with explicit dimensions. Self-hosted fonts via next/font. Server-side rendering for every page. No third-party scripts blocking the first paint.
We build the same performance standards into client sites. Your visitors feel the difference even if they cannot name it.
burch-studio.co.uk/contact?audit