Somebody is looking for your helpline number at eleven at night. They’re on an old phone, on one bar of signal, and they are not in a patient frame of mind. Your page takes seven seconds to appear, so they go back to the search results and try whoever is next on the list.
You’ll never know it happened. No bounced email, no complaint, nothing in the missed call log. That is the quietest way a website can fail, and it’s why speed is worth half a day of your attention. Not for the search ranking. For the person who gave up.
Nearly every site owner thinks their site is quicker than it really is. That isn’t carelessness, it’s just how browsers work.
You look at your own site on a desktop, on good broadband, in a browser that already has your logo, your fonts and most of your photographs saved from the last time you visited. A good chunk of the page is coming off your own hard disk rather than down the wire. It appears instantly. Of course it does.
A first time visitor on a phone is downloading every last piece of it over mobile data, on a processor that has to work a good deal harder than yours to put it on the screen. Same website, completely different experience of it, and theirs is the one that counts.
You don’t need to buy anything, and the first version of this takes about two minutes.
Take your phone off the wifi so it’s genuinely on mobile data. If the signal at your desk happens to be excellent, walk to the end of the road. Open a private browsing window, which stops the phone using anything it saved earlier, and check you aren’t logged in to WordPress. Then load your own site and count out loud.
Test the pages that actually matter, not just the home page. Your contact page, your donate page, the referral form, whichever page your Google listing points at. Those are where somebody lands when they genuinely need you, and they’re often heavier than the home page because nobody has ever thought to look.
If you’d rather have a number than a count, Google’s PageSpeed Insights is free and gives you two different things. The lab result is a simulation, and it’s useful for working out what’s wrong. The field data at the top, when it shows up at all, is measured from real visitors over the past month, and that’s the one to believe. Run it a few times across a couple of days, because one bad reading is weather rather than climate.
The measurement worth knowing is called Largest Contentful Paint, which is a clumsy name for a sensible idea: the moment the biggest thing on the screen has actually arrived. Google treats under two and a half seconds as good, and over four seconds as poor.
In practice, on the ordinary charity sites I get sent, under three seconds on a phone on mobile data is a solid place to be. Between three and five you’re losing a slice of people. Once you’re up around eight, I’d expect most of them to be gone before the page finishes, and no amount of careful writing further down will rescue that, because nobody is there to read it.
One warning though. Don’t chase a score of 100. It’s entirely possible to spend a fortnight winning ten points that no human being can feel. What you’re after is a page that arrives quickly for a stranger on a bad signal, not a green circle in a report.
Photographs, almost always. A picture straight off a modern camera or phone can be four or five megabytes, and it tends to get uploaded exactly as it came. One page might be carrying six of them. The browser then shrinks that enormous image down to a few hundred pixels wide to fit your layout, having politely downloaded every last byte of it first. This one item is frequently most of the problem, and putting it right is an afternoon with a free tool rather than a rebuild.
Plugins loading everywhere. A booking form you use on one page will load its scripts and its stylesheet on all forty of your other pages too, unless somebody has told it not to. Multiply that by a dozen plugins picked up over five years and your home page is carrying the machinery for features it never uses.
The home page slider. Three or four full width images, and nearly everyone who visits sees only the first one. They almost always cost more in load time than they earn in attention. If yours exists because nobody could agree on which photograph to use, that’s a meeting rather than a design decision.
Hosting, and I’ve left it until last on purpose. This is the one people expect me to blame first. Cheap shared hosting is a real thing and it does slow sites down. It’s just rarely the biggest number on the list, and moving host is disruptive, so it’s a poor place to start. Sort the three above, look again, and see whether the hosting still hurts. Very often it doesn’t.
Speed is one of the things Google measures directly, so yes, it feeds into your search visibility. That’s worth having. It still isn’t the point.
The point is who leaves. The people trying to reach a charity tend to be the ones with the least patience left to spend. Someone in the middle of a genuinely bad week, on an old handset, with a small data allowance being quietly eaten by your four megabyte hero image. The person from the top of this page, still awake at eleven because it’s the first quiet hour of their day. They are also, almost by definition, exactly who the site was built for.
A slow website turns those people away without ever telling you. Your analytics will record it as a bounce, which sounds like a statistic rather than a person giving up.
Speed drifts, the same way accessibility does. New pages go up carrying photographs straight off the camera. A plugin update adds another script. Somebody drops a video embed on the front page because it looked good in the meeting. A site that was in fine shape in the spring is quietly heavy again by the autumn, and nobody on the inside notices, because every one of them has the whole thing saved in their browser.
That’s why this sits better as something you check now and then than as a job you do once, and it’s part of what a support retainer covers.
If you’d rather somebody else went and looked, that’s what my free website health check is for. Speed is one part of it, alongside accessibility, security and how visible the site is in search. What comes back is a short plain English note on what’s worth fixing and what to leave well alone. No obligation, and no jargon.
JGS Solutions is an independent digital consultancy working with charities, safeguarding teams and small businesses across Gloucestershire and beyond.
If you’re planning a new WordPress website, looking to refresh an existing one, or need ongoing support, I’m here to help. You don’t need to have everything figured out before you reach out. We can talk it through together and find the best approach for your organisation.