Your Website Is Slow, and It’s Costing You Customers: A 5-Minute Speed Check for Business Owners

Picture a customer standing in line, looking you up on their phone. Your website takes a few seconds too long to load, so they tap back and choose the next result. You never know it happened.

Speed is one of the few website problems you can check yourself in five minutes, with a free tool from Google. Here’s how.

Step 1: Open Google’s free speed test

Go to PageSpeed Insights, paste your website address, and click Analyze. It takes about 30 seconds.

Step 2: Look at the Mobile score first

The report opens on Mobile, and that’s the one that matters most. Most local customers find you on their phone, often on a cellular connection, and Google uses the mobile version of your site when deciding how to rank it.

You’ll see a score from 0 to 100:

• 90 to 100 (green): fast. Nice work.
• 50 to 89 (orange): room to improve. Customers may notice a delay.
• 0 to 49 (red): slow. You’re likely losing visitors before they see anything.

Don’t panic if your phone score is lower than your desktop score. That’s normal. Just know which bucket you’re in.

Step 3: Check the “Core Web Vitals”

Near the top you may see a box that says your site passed or failed the Core Web Vitals assessment. This is based on real visitors to your site, if Google has enough data. The three measures, in plain English:

• Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the main thing on the page, usually the big photo or headline, shows up. Under 2.5 seconds is good.
• Interaction to Next Paint: how quickly the page reacts when someone taps a button or menu.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: whether things jump around as the page loads, like a button moving just as you go to tap it.

Step 4: Skim the suggestions (but don’t get lost)

Below the scores you’ll see a list of suggestions full of technical terms. You don’t need to understand all of them. The usual culprits on small business sites are:

• Huge photos uploaded straight from a camera or phone.
• Too many plugins and add-ons, each loading its own code.
• Page builders and heavy themes that load features you never use.
• Pop-ups, chat widgets and tracking scripts stacked on top of each other.
• Slow, crowded hosting.

Step 5: Run your top competitor too

Paste in the website of a competitor who shows up above you on Google. It’s a quick way to see whether speed could be part of why.

What a fix actually looks like

Sometimes the fix is simple: shrink a few photos, remove plugins you don’t use, or move to better hosting. But if the site is built on a heavy theme with a page builder and a long list of plugins, there’s only so much tuning can do.

That was our own situation. Our old WordPress site scored 37 on phones. After we rebuilt it as a custom site, it scored 70 on phones, and desktop went from 59 to 83, on the same content. Every site we build now is made to load only what it needs.

Want a second opinion?

Send us your PageSpeed Insights link through our contact page and we’ll tell you, in plain language, what’s slowing your site down and whether it’s a quick fix or a rebuild. Or see how our websites are built.