When we audited our own website this autumn, the homepage took between 8.6 and 9.2 seconds to show its main content on a mobile connection. Google’s guideline for a good experience is under 2.5 seconds. After a careful clean-up and a rebuild, the same page now loads its main content in about 1.2 seconds, and scores 100 for performance in Google Lighthouse.

Here is exactly what was slowing it down, what we changed, and what you can check on your own site.

How we measured

We used Google Lighthouse, the same engine behind PageSpeed Insights, in its mobile mode. It simulates a mid-range phone on a slower network, which is closer to what many real visitors experience than a fast office connection. The key number is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long it takes for the biggest piece of content, usually the main heading or image, to appear.

We ran every test more than once. Single runs can vary, especially straight after clearing a cache, so we only trust numbers that repeat.

Problem 1: the page loaded twice

The biggest surprise was a caching setting. Our caching plugin had a “guest mode” enabled, designed to serve a quick first version of the page and then adjust it. In practice, every first-time visitor’s browser downloaded the homepage, made a background request, and then reloaded the entire page. New visitors, the people you most want to impress, waited for the page twice.

Turning that one option off cut several seconds from the mobile load time. It is a good reminder that performance features can work against you if they are switched on without measuring the result.

Check on your site: open your homepage in a private browser window with the network panel of your browser’s developer tools open. If the main document appears twice, something is reloading it.

Problem 2: far too many fonts

The old site loaded one typeface in eighteen different weights and styles, plus two other font families, all from an external font service. Each one had to be discovered and downloaded before the text could be drawn properly, and the request to the outside service blocked the page from rendering.

The new site uses a single font family in a small number of weights, served from our own server. That removed the render-blocking request entirely, and it also means visitors’ browsers no longer contact a third-party service just to show text.

Check on your site: count how many font files load on your homepage. Most websites need one or two families and three or four weights at most.

Problem 3: heavy images

Several images were exported far larger than they were ever displayed, with the biggest around 834 KB. Large images are often the single biggest part of a page’s weight. In our case the whole homepage weighed about 1.7 MB.

The new design leans on lightweight illustrations drawn in code, which stay sharp on every screen and weigh almost nothing. The rebuilt homepage now transfers about 83 KB in total.

Check on your site: make sure images are exported at roughly the size they are displayed, in a modern format such as WebP or AVIF, and that images below the first screen load lazily.

Problem 4: a page builder doing too much

Page builders make it easy to design pages visually, but they often load scripts and styles for every feature on every page, whether the page uses them or not. Our old homepage loaded dozens of stylesheets and scripts from several add-ons.

We rebuilt the site as a lightweight custom theme. Each page now loads one stylesheet, one font file set and one small script. Interactive pieces, such as the animated system on our homepage, only run when they are on screen, and they respect visitors who have asked their device to reduce motion.

The results

  • Mobile LCP: from 8.6–9.2 seconds to about 1.2–1.3 seconds.
  • Mobile performance score: from 64 to 100.
  • Homepage weight: from about 1.7 MB to about 83 KB.
  • Accessibility, best practices and SEO scores: 100 each.

Why this matters for your business

Speed is not a vanity metric. A slow first impression costs attention before a visitor has read a single word, and search engines use page experience as one of many signals. The good news is that the biggest wins are often simple: one misconfigured setting, too many fonts, or oversized images.

If your website feels slow, start by measuring it, fix the largest problem first, and measure again. And if you would like a second pair of eyes, we’re happy to take a look.