Why your website has to be fast on a phone

Almost everyone who visits your website does it on a phone, often on mobile data, sometimes on a weak signal, usually in a hurry. If the page does not appear quickly, they are gone before they have seen a thing, back to the search results and the next option. Speed is not a technical nicety for a hospitality site. It is whether the guest ever sees your rooms at all.

A slow page loses the guest twice

Slowness costs you in two ways at once. First, the guest: people abandon a page that makes them wait, and the longer the wait, the more of them leave, before a single photo has loaded. Second, Google: it measures how fast your pages are and ranks slow ones lower, so a slow site is both harder to find and easier to leave. You lose the visitor you had and the visibility that would have brought more.

What actually makes a site slow

For a hospitality site it is almost always the same short list, in order:

• Large, unoptimised photos. By far the most common cause. A single full-size image straight off a camera can weigh more than an entire well-built page. Compressed and served properly, the same photo looks just as good and loads in a fraction of the time.
• Heavy templates. Many page-builder themes load a great deal of code you never use, just in case, and it all has to arrive before the page is ready.
• Too many add-ons and trackers. Each plugin, chat widget and analytics script adds weight. A few are fine; a pile of them is a tax on every visit.

The good news is that the biggest cause, images, is also the most fixable, and it costs nothing but doing it properly.

How to check yours in a minute

You do not need a tool to start. Open your site on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, and count. If it is not usable in two or three seconds, it is too slow, and your guests are feeling exactly what you just felt. For a fuller picture, Google's free PageSpeed Insights will grade it and tell you what is heavy, but the phone-in-the-hand test tells you most of what you need to know.

Fast is a choice, not a budget

A slow site is rarely slow because it was cheap. It is slow because it is bloated: unoptimised images, a heavy theme, too much bolted on. A lean site, built properly, is fast by default, and staying fast is mostly a matter of discipline rather than money. It is one of the things a site built to be found gets right from the start, and it is closely tied to handling your photos well.

If your site is slow on a phone, it is quietly costing you guests every day. Tell us what you have now and we will tell you honestly whether speed is the problem and what it would take to fix.