How to check if your website is fast enough, and what to fix first
Test your site with Google's free tools, understand Core Web Vitals in plain English, and fix the usual reasons a small business website is slow.
By the Social Expert Digital team · · 3 min read
A slow website costs you calls. Not mainly because Google punishes it, though speed does play a part in search, but because people on their phones give up. If your page takes several seconds to show anything useful on a patchy mobile connection, plenty of them will hit the back button and try the next result.
The good news is you can test your site in a couple of minutes with free tools, and the usual causes can be fixed.
Run the test
- Go to PageSpeed Insights, Google's free testing tool.
- Paste in your home page address and click Analyze.
- Make sure you're on the Mobile tab. Most of your customers are on phones, and mobile results are always worse than desktop.
- Run it again for your most important service page, since some pages are slower than others.
Reading the results without getting lost
The report has two parts, and people often mix them up.
The top section is real-world data, if your site gets enough traffic. Google collects it from Chrome users who've actually visited, and this is what matters most. Small sites often don't have enough visitors for this section to appear, which is completely normal.
The bottom section is a lab test, with a performance score out of 100. It simulates loading your page on a mid-range phone over a slowish connection. It's good for finding problems, but the score wobbles a bit from one run to the next. Don't chase 100. A score in the green is fine, and the difference between 92 and 98 won't change how many people call you.
The three numbers that matter
Google calls these the Core Web Vitals. In plain English:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long until the main thing on the page, usually the big headline or main image, shows up. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page reacts when someone taps a button or opens a menu. Good is 200 milliseconds or less. It replaced an older measure, First Input Delay, in 2024.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much things jump around while the page loads, like when you go to tap a button and it moves because an image loaded above it. Good is 0.1 or less.
Why small business sites are usually slow
The cause is nearly always on this list, roughly in this order:
- Huge images. A photo straight off a modern phone can be several megabytes. Uploaded as-is into a home page banner, it's often the single biggest problem. Images should be resized to the size they're actually shown at and saved in a modern format like WebP or AVIF.
- Too many add-ons. Chat widgets, review carousels, social media feeds, pop-ups and a pile of tracking scripts. Each one is small. Together they add up. Remove any that nobody can explain.
- Too many plugins. On WordPress, each plugin can add its own code to every page. A site running 40 plugins can usually do without most of them.
- Slow hosting. If the server itself is slow to respond (the report calls this server response time, or time to first byte), no amount of image tweaking will fix it. The cheapest shared hosting is sometimes the culprit.
- Sliders and videos at the top of the page. An auto-playing video or a five-slide carousel as the first thing visitors see is heavy, and most people never get past the first slide anyway. One strong photo and a clear headline usually work better.
- Fonts. Several custom fonts, each in several weights, add up fast. Two fonts are plenty for most sites.
What to fix first
Start with images. On most sites it's the biggest win, and you don't need a developer: resize photos before you upload them, or use an image compression plugin if you're on WordPress. Then remove widgets and plugins you don't need. Run PageSpeed Insights again after each change so you can see what actually helped.
If server response time is the problem, or the site is built in a way that's hard to slim down, that's when rebuilding can work out cheaper than patching.
A check you can do without any tools
Open your site on your own phone, on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi, somewhere with an average signal. Count how long it takes before you can read the headline and tap the phone number. If it's more than a few seconds, your customers are feeling it too.