How Fast Should My Website Load?

Fast enough is a published number, not an opinion. Your main content should be on screen within 2.5 seconds. The page should answer a tap within 200 milliseconds. Nothing should jump under somebody's thumb while it loads. Miss those and Google ranks you below sites that hit them, whatever your content says.

Here is what that looks like on sites I have built. Delux Financial Solutions, a credit-education practice in Houston, scores 98 on mobile and 100 on desktop. Hollingshead Harbor, the marine arm of SRM, comes back at 91 and 99. Compound Industrial Scale Services in Huffman scores 93 on mobile. Faded Barber Shop in Liberty scores 96. Those are Google's own figures, each one the median of three runs.

01Why the High Ones Are High

Delux is the plainest of them, and the plainest is usually the fastest. Nothing on that site has to boot before the first word is readable, so there is nothing to wait for. The page arrives already assembled and the browser gets to draw it instead of building it.

That is most of the answer for the other three as well. None of them is doing anything clever. They are small, they are served from close to whoever asked, and they carry no code that the page does not use.

02And Why Two of Mine Are Not

Speedway 146, the go-kart track on TX-146 in Baytown, sits at 72 on mobile and 74 on desktop. It is carrying a cart, a Stripe checkout, and an authenticated staff back office, and that costs what it costs. Faded Barber Shop reads 96 on a phone and 70 on a laptop, because its page draws one continuous fade from long hair down to skin as you scroll, on a full-screen canvas, and a bigger canvas is more work.

A score on its own settles nothing. The question is whether what a page spends its time on is worth what the visitor pays for it. A track selling tickets has a reason. A five-page brochure site scoring 40 does not.

03What Slow Costs You

Amazon found that every extra 100 milliseconds of load time cost them one percent of sales. You are not Amazon, but the mechanism is the same and it is worse for a local trade, because somebody searching for a service on a phone is ready to buy right now. They are not browsing. They need a plumber, a mechanic, or a barber in the next hour, and they will take whichever site opens.

04Test Yours in Two Minutes

Go to pagespeed.web.dev, put your address in, and read the mobile column rather than the desktop one. Aim for 90 or better. If you are on Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress with a stack of plugins, expect somewhere between 30 and 60, and know that this is normal for those platforms rather than something you have done wrong.

05Speed Is Not Something You Add Afterwards

Almost everything that makes a page fast is decided before a line of it is written: how much code goes to the browser, how the images are sized, where the site is served from, and whether anything has to run before the first word appears. You can trim a slow site. You cannot retrofit a fast one. If your current site is slow, fixing it comes before new content and before anything else you were planning to add.