Is your website slow on phones? A 60 second test

01How do I run the test?

1. On your phone or computer, open PageSpeed Insights, Google's free speed checker.
2. Paste your home page address and press Analyze.
3. Stay on the Mobile tab. It's the harder test, and it's how anyone looking you up from a truck or a parking lot sees you.
4. Find Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). It's how long it takes for the biggest thing on the screen, usually your top photo or headline, to show up.

That's the 60 seconds. Write the number down with the date, because it changes.

02What number should I be looking for?

Google's guide to LCP says sites "should strive to have Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less." The PageSpeed Insights documentation sorts it into three buckets:

You may see two sets of numbers. The top set, when it appears, is real visitor data from Chrome users over the last 28 days. Small local sites often don't have enough visitors for it, so you'll only see the lower set, a lab test Google runs on the spot. Both are useful. The lab number is the one you can check again right after a fix.

Don't worry much about the big score out of 100. It moves around. When we tested 21 sites three times each on October 5, one home page scored 35 on one run and 75 on the next two. LCP in seconds is the steadier thing to watch.

03Does a few seconds really matter?

For someone standing in a parking lot trying to find your number, yes. Google's web.dev guide (last updated November 2023) points to the BBC, which found it lost an additional 10% of users for every extra second its site took to load. That's a big national site, not a Grand Valley shop, so treat it as a direction, not a forecast. But the direction is clear: the slower the page, the more people give up.

04How do the local web design firms' own sites do?

On the afternoon of October 8, 2026, we ran the same mobile test (Lighthouse, three runs each) on the home pages of 20 web design and marketing firms that market to Grand Junction businesses. These are the people building a lot of the valley's websites. 17 of the 20 home pages had an LCP over 4 seconds. The middle result was about 12 seconds. We're not naming anyone. Sites change, and one afternoon's test on one network is a snapshot, not a verdict.

We tested our own site the same way. When we first ran it, on the evening of October 5, it wasn't great either: 4.4 seconds, which is in the poor bucket. We kept working on it. On October 8, the same Lighthouse test gave our home page 3.5, 2.0 and 3.6 seconds across three runs. The same day, Google's PageSpeed Insights showed 2.2 seconds on its Mobile tab, which is "good." One good run isn't a finish line, so we'll keep checking.

05What usually makes a site slow?

From what we measured across those 20 sites, the same few things kept coming up:

• Heavy pages. 10 of the 20 home pages downloaded more than 3 MB.
• Big photos. 5 home pages had a single image over 500 KB, and 7 could have saved more than 250 KB just by using a modern image format.
• Code nobody uses. 10 sites loaded more than 250 KB of JavaScript that never ran.
• Things that block the page from drawing. On 11 sites, Lighthouse estimated that styles or scripts were holding up the first paint by more than a second.

One lesson from our own site: an earlier version opened with short moving clips, and that home page weighed 8.34 MB on a mobile test. We swapped the clips for still photos and the page dropped to 0.62 MB. In that lab test the LCP barely moved (both versions mostly landed under 4 seconds), so weight and LCP aren't the same thing. But that's 7.7 MB less on every first visit, on someone's data plan, and we'd make the same swap again.

06What can I fix myself?

• Shrink your photos before you upload them. A phone photo straight off the camera is often several megabytes. Most website builders and free tools can resize to about 2,000 pixels wide and save as WebP or a compressed JPEG.
• Lose the slider or the autoplay video at the top. One good photo with your name, what you do and your phone number does more.
• Remove apps, plugins and widgets you don't use. Chat bubbles, review carousels and old tracking tags each add code.
• Run the test again after each change, so you know which one helped.

If you're on a builder like Wix or Squarespace, the photos and the add ons are usually where you have control. If someone built your site, send them your PageSpeed link and ask what they'd change first.