Site speed, measured on your phone.

Picture someone at the bus station in Trogir looking for somewhere to eat tonight. They type “konoba” into a search engine, tap the first result and wait. The screen is white, then half a picture appears, then the text jumps just as they try to tap it. Nobody waits long. They go back to the results and tap the next one. The owner of the first konoba will never know that guest existed.

A slow site loses people quietly.

That is what makes slowness dangerous. It never shows up as a fault, and nobody will message you to say your site opens slowly. People simply leave, and all you see is that fewer of them get in touch than you expected. On the office computer everything looks fine, because the connection is fast and the site is already stored in the browser. The real visitor arrives on a phone, often on mobile data, and for the first time.

Speed also affects how people find you. Google says publicly that when it orders results it also looks at the experience on the page, including how quickly it loads. Nobody outside Google knows exactly how much that weighs, and it should not be sold as magic. But a slow site helps nobody, neither the visitor nor the search engine.

What slows a site down.

It is rarely one big problem. Usually it is many small loads that add up:

• Pictures too large for a phone. A photograph prepared for print is sent to the phone at full size, and the phone then shrinks it. The visitor waited for detail they will never see on a small screen.
• Other people's servers. Fonts from one server, a chat window from another, social media buttons from a third. Each one is another connection the site has to wait for.
• Heavy add-ons. Off-the-shelf site builders often drag in add-ons for things the site does not even use. The code loads although nobody needs it.
• Things that pop up. Anything that jumps over the content or pushes the text down feels slow to a visitor, even when the page has technically loaded.

How I build fast sites.

My rule is simple: a page carries only what the visitor needs. The fonts are stored with the site itself and come from the same address, not from someone else's server. Every photograph exists in several sizes, so a phone gets a picture made for a phone, not one made for a large screen. Nothing is loaded just in case.

A common habit is to load pictures only when the visitor scrolls to them. On paper that saves something; in practice the visitor watches an empty frame fill in front of their eyes and reads it as a slow site. That is why the pictures at the top of a page load straight away, and the space for every picture is reserved in advance, so the text does not jump while the pictures arrive.

On sorich.hr it goes one step further. In browsers that support it, the page you are likely to open next is prepared in the background, so it opens almost at once when you tap it. And a page you have opened once with a signal stays saved on the phone, as the article on working without a signal explains.

Speed measured on your device, not in a lab.

Speed is easy to make look good. Every measurement in a tool is made under some set conditions, and adverts quote the best figure they got. Your visitor is not in those conditions. That is why sorich.hr does not show a figure I measured, but the one your device has just measured: how long this page took to open on your phone or computer, on your connection, right now. It stands just below, with how much data was transferred, and if the page opened from your phone's memory, it says so.

That figure is not always the same. On Wi-Fi it is lower, on a weak signal higher, on an older phone different again. That is exactly what makes it honest: I cannot adjust it, because I do not calculate it; your browser does. When a page was prepared in the background, the figure is measured from the moment you opened it, not from the moment the browser started preparing it.

That is why I do not state how many seconds my sites take to load. It would be a figure measured under my conditions. The figure above is yours.

How to check your own site.

Open your site on your phone, turn off Wi-Fi and look at it like a guest seeing it for the first time. Does the text appear straight away? Does the content jump while you try to tap it? Do you have to close something before you see the phone number? If you would like me to look, the free website check measures speed too, along with nine other areas, and the report arrives within 24 hours.