Every Excuse I Hear for a Slow Charleston Website, Ranked

How long does your website take to put something readable in front of a customer, on her phone, on whatever signal she happens to have where she is standing?

Nobody knows. That isn’t a dig at Charleston, either. I have asked hundreds of owners here that question over the years and I have had maybe four real answers back, and two of those turned out to be wrong.

I keep asking because of one result I had to check twice before I would believe it.

I pulled 4,580 Charleston businesses into the sample and opened 3,299 of their websites to build the picture, so this isn’t a hunch I had in traffic.

The city does well. It does well right up until the moment a customer has to wait for something.

Whenever I say that out loud around here, I get one of the same seven answers back. Below they are, ordered from the one I hear almost daily down to the one I hear least, with what I actually think of each.

”Everybody’s website is slow around here.”

Verdict: true, and it will not save you.

Charleston averages 55 out of 100 on phone speed, the lowest of the 24 cities I tested, where the country manages 58.

Last place here means sitting at the back of a slow group rather than stranded alone in a field somewhere.

None of that makes it fine. What it makes it is cheap, because nobody in front of you is far enough ahead to be out of reach.

”But we came fourth overall, so the website must be alright.”

Verdict: true, and it’s the wrong number to be celebrating.

Charleston does score 73 out of 100 when I rank the cities, with only three cities finishing above it.

My score is built from ten weighted checks, and nine of them ask a yes or no question about whether something exists.

Is there a padlock on the address? A title on the page? A line of code somewhere announcing your opening hours?

A robot answers every one of those from the sidewalk, without ever walking through your front door or waiting on anything at all.

Speed is the odd one out and always has been, because speed is the check your customer performs personally, standing in a parking lot with one bar of signal.

Fourth at the paperwork, last at the waiting.

Which of those two do you think she notices?

You will never hear a word from the one who gave up, either. In all the years I have done this, nobody has emailed a business to explain that they were about to book until the homepage kept them waiting.

A woman four blocks from my client’s gym decided to join at twenty to ten on a Tuesday night, and she gave up before the class schedule ever appeared.

”My website is mobile-friendly. I paid extra for that.”

Verdict: true, and it answers a different question.

79.0% of Charleston sites pass Google’s basic mobile checks, a shade above the national 78%, which is 6 of 24 among the cities I checked.

A developer settled that one on the afternoon your theme was chosen, and it has never needed touching since.

Speed isn’t one decision made on one afternoon. It’s a hundred small ones you kept making afterward, and no theme has ever made a single one of them on your behalf.

Picture your own customer for a second. Your page fits her screen beautifully, your buttons sit exactly where her thumb expects to find them, and she is staring at a blank white rectangle while all of that loads in behind the scenes.

”It’s the platform. WordPress is bloated.”

Verdict: no, and I say that as someone who has blamed the platform himself.

Look at what this city builds on. 32.8% of the sites here run WordPress, 10.4% Squarespace, 8.2% Wix, 5.8% Shopify and 2.4% Framer.

Those shares don’t add up to a hundred, because a website can match two platforms at once and nothing is detected at all on about three sites in ten.

Not one of those platforms is slow when you first open the box. Every one of them will cheerfully carry whatever you hand it, without ever warning you what the load is doing to a customer on cellular data.

And what do businesses around here hand it? Pictures. Enormous ones. Rooms, plates, boats, dresses, ceremonies, the front of a beautiful old building at golden hour.

Then a booking widget goes on, which takes ten minutes and gets added by whoever set your reservations up. Then a chat bubble, installed by the company selling the chat bubble.

Then a reviews strip, a map, and a tracking pixel for the advertising campaign you ran back in April and never switched off.

Every one of those took someone under a quarter of an hour to add, and not one of them was ever handed to a person whose job was taking things off again.

”Our photos have to look like that. We’re a visual business.”

Verdict: half right, and the half you are wrong about is the expensive half.

Google asks for the biggest thing on the screen, usually that gorgeous hero photograph, to appear within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load, and says that kind of experience lines up with what its ranking systems reward.

Two and a half seconds. On a phone. On whatever signal she has where she is standing.

Nobody is asking you to publish uglier photographs. A photo can weigh a tenth of what it weighs today and look identical on a phone screen, which is ten minutes of work for whoever manages your images.

If that person is nobody, then it is ten minutes of work for you, once, this morning.

I spent a Saturday doing exactly that to a med spa gallery instead of rebuilding the site underneath it.

”It seems fast enough when I look at it.”

Verdict: of course it does.

You test on office wifi, on a laptop, on a website your own browser has already cached and is holding ready for you before you finish typing the address.

Your customer does none of those things.

Walk outside, turn the wifi off on your phone, and load your own address while counting out loud. Or paste it into PageSpeed Insights, which is free, needs no account and takes about a minute, then read the mobile tab, because that is the version Google ranks.

”I’ll deal with all of it in the redesign.”

Verdict: no, and it is the most expensive answer on this whole list.

A redesign is months away and thousands of dollars deep. The hero photograph is this morning, and the abandoned plugins are this afternoon.

I won’t quote an electrician a speed rebuild either, because the score he wants promised to him moves between two tests on the same morning.

I have never once seen a website turn slow because of a single bad decision. They turn slow after two years of perfectly reasonable ones, and they turn fast again after about an hour of unpicking, mostly the same nine easy fixes every time.

The padlock on this city’s addresses is a different story. 95.0% of sites here serve over HTTPS, against 94% nationally. Whoever set your site up switched that lock on with a single click, probably years ago, and it has kept working ever since.

Last place on one ugly check is not the same thing as a broken city.

Who I didn’t write any of this for

A city average pools every kind of business in town into one number, which is a blunt instrument to be handing an individual owner.

Your trade might be the thing propping the average up, or your trade might be the reason it looks the way it does, and you cannot tell which from a figure with a whole city stirred into it.

So I didn’t write this for the owner who already runs every photo through a compressor before it goes anywhere near the site.

I didn’t write it for the business that sells entirely by telephone and by name, where the website is a formality and the referrals do all the real work. Spend the afternoon on something better.

I didn’t write it for anyone who has watched their own homepage load on a stranger’s phone this year, on a connection they didn’t control, and knows exactly what happened.

And if you would rather hand the whole problem to a designer in town, that is my job and I am happy to take it.

Everybody else, the ones still testing on the office wifi and calling it fine, I wrote every word of this for you.