Nearly every website looks fast to the person who built it. It was built on a good laptop, on an office connection, with everything already cached in the browser. None of that describes your customer.
Your customer is on a phone, on mobile data, possibly in a moving vehicle, with three other apps open. If your page takes eight seconds to show anything, they are gone before they know what you sell, and you will never see that they were there.
Test it honestly first
Before changing anything, find out what is actually true.
Take your own phone off the office WiFi, open a private window, and type your website address. Count the seconds until you can read a sentence. That number is your reality, and it is often two or three times worse than anybody in the business believes.
Do it again on a weekday afternoon rather than late at night, because network congestion is real and your customers are not browsing at 2am.
If you want a second opinion, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will grade the page and list what is slowing it down. Read the mobile tab, not the desktop one. The desktop score is close to meaningless for a Nigerian audience.
The causes, in the order they usually matter
Enormous images. This is the biggest one by a distance and the easiest to fix. A photograph straight from a phone camera can be four or five megabytes. Displayed at the size a website actually shows it, it needs to be a tiny fraction of that. Sites routinely carry ten of these on the homepage, which means a customer on mobile data is downloading tens of megabytes to see a page of text and three photographs.
The fix is to resize images to the dimensions they are displayed at, save them in a modern format, and compress them. Free tools do this in a browser. On most Nigerian small business websites this single change is the difference between usable and abandoned.
Too many plugins and scripts. Every chat widget, popup tool, analytics add-on, social feed and font library is another thing to download before the page is usable. Sites accumulate these over years and nobody removes the ones that stopped being used. Every one of them costs your customer time.
Fonts loaded from somewhere else. A custom font fetched from an external service is a request to another server, in another country, before any text can appear. It is invisible on fast connections and expensive on slow ones.
Where the site is hosted. If your hosting is on a single server far away, every visitor waits for that round trip. A content delivery network keeps copies closer to the visitor and removes most of that delay. Many modern hosts include one by default, and many cheap ones do not.
Video that plays automatically. A background video on the homepage is a fashionable way to spend a customer’s data allowance. On a Nigerian mobile connection it is close to hostile.
A heavy page builder. Some website builders produce pages carrying a great deal of code to achieve simple layouts. You may not be able to change this without changing platform, which is worth knowing before you conclude the problem is unfixable.
Fix it in this order
Step 1. Compress and resize every image on the pages people actually land on. Homepage first, then whichever page your advertising points at. This is usually an afternoon and usually the majority of the improvement.
Step 2. Remove every plugin, widget and script you are not actively using. Be ruthless. If nobody has looked at its output in six months, it is costing you customers for nothing.
Step 3. Turn off any automatically playing video, or replace it with a still image.
Step 4. Check whether your host offers a content delivery network and switch it on if so.
Step 5. Reduce the number of custom fonts, or host them yourself rather than fetching them from elsewhere.
Doing them in this order matters, because step one usually delivers more than steps two to five combined, and doing the fiddly ones first is how people conclude that optimisation does not work.
Why this is worth the afternoon
Three reasons, and the third is the one people miss.
A visitor who leaves before the page loads cannot buy anything, and you will never know they existed, because they never registered as a visit anybody looks at.
Speed is one of the things Google weighs when deciding what to show, measured on mobile. So a slow site is fighting itself in the rankings as well as at the door.
And if you are paying for advertising, you are paying for every one of those people who left. A slow landing page makes every campaign more expensive, permanently, and no amount of campaign tuning compensates for it.
Page weight and load time are two of the things our free deep digital audit measures, on a mobile viewport rather than a desktop one, alongside everything else a customer meets on the way to you. There is no charge for finding out where you stand.
