How heavy is your website? A page speed playground

Every photo, script and font has to travel to your visitor's phone before the page appears. Build a page from parts and see how long it takes on mobile data.

Before a page appears on someone’s phone, every file it needs has to travel there: the text, the photos, the code that makes things move, the fonts that make it look like your brand. Add all of that up and you get the page’s weight.

On office Wi-Fi a heavy page still feels fine. On mobile data, on the move, with a weak signal, it doesn’t. Many of your customers browse exactly like that, and they are the ones a slow page loses.

Build a page and time it

The sliders below make up a typical business website. Move them to match yours, or click the fixes to see what each one is worth. Times are worked out from the connection speeds shown next to each bar. They are estimates, not lab measurements, but they show the shape of the problem.

What usually makes a page heavy

Photos, almost always. A photo straight from a phone or camera can be 3 to 5 MB. On a website it rarely needs to be more than 100 to 300 KB. Ten unedited photos on a home page can weigh more than everything else put together.

Scripts nobody uses any more. Chat widgets from a trial that ended, three different analytics tools, a slider plugin for a slider that was removed: each one adds weight and work for the phone. Removing what you don’t use costs nothing.

Too many fonts. Every weight and style of a font (regular, bold, italic, bold italic) is a separate file. Two or three files is usually plenty.

The fixes, in order of value

1. Resize and compress images. Save them in a modern format like WebP, at the size they are actually shown. This is usually the biggest single win.
2. Load images only when they are needed. Photos further down the page can wait until the visitor scrolls towards them.
3. Remove unused scripts and plugins. Go through them one by one and ask: do we still use this?
4. Limit fonts. Pick one family, two or three weights.
5. Use good hosting and a CDN. A server close to your visitors cuts the waiting before anything even starts to download.

How to check your real site

Open PageSpeed Insights, paste your address and run the mobile test. It measures your actual page and lists what to fix first. Don’t chase a perfect score; aim for a page that feels quick on a phone.

If the report reads like another language, send it to us. Making sites fast, then keeping them fast, is part of our website development work.