Nobody in Tampa Is Waiting on Your Homepage

I won’t crush a Tampa client’s photographs into mush to buy back a few points on a speed test.

Resizing them properly, once, at the size they’re actually displayed? Of course. That’s free and it’s my job.

But grinding a photo of a real person and her real shop into a smear of gray pixels, so that a circle on someone else’s report turns a nicer color? No. She hired me to make her look like she does good work.

That refusal has cost me at least two clients I can name, and it is the same reason I wouldn’t sell an electrician the speed rebuild he asked for. It brings me straight to the thing I hear more than anything else on this subject.

“I keep getting emails telling me my website is too slow. Is that why the phone’s quiet?”

I want to give that a fair hearing before I take it apart, because a version of it is true.

A heavy page really can empty out on you. I’ve opened a homepage where a single storefront photograph took longer to arrive than everything else on the page put together, and shrinking that one file was the best hour anyone spent on that business all year.

And the visitor a slow page costs you is never a tourist. She typed your name in on purpose. She was already most of the way to hiring you, standing on a sidewalk in the sun, watching a white rectangle decide whether to show her anything at all.

So the worry isn’t silly, and I’d rather a client asked me about load times than never wondered about the site at all.

It’s just pointed at the wrong city.

Where the number actually lands

Of everything I check in this city, phone speed is what Tampa does best.

Tampa averages 59 out of 100 there, 4th of 24. Not fourth in the state, not fourth on some vendor’s list. Fourth of every city I ran the same test on.

That sits above the 58 out of 100 I get across small business websites in general, which means the stranger emailing you about load times has picked, by accident, the single thing your city is quietly good at.

The number isn’t seconds, by the way. It’s a grade built out of a handful of separate timings, and it reached me as a single figure sitting next to a business name and an address I’d never visit.

The tool doing the timing is called Lighthouse. It opens your homepage over a deliberately bad connection on a deliberately cheap phone, because that’s closer to your actual customer than my office wifi will ever be.

3,238 sites in this city sat through that, one at a time, overnight, while I slept.

The trick hiding in that second band

Google’s own scale calls anything under 50 poor, and everything from 50 to 89 in need of improvement.

Every one of the 24 cities I tested sits inside that second band. The quickest of them and the slowest of them, same label, all year round.

So “you should make it faster” is a sentence that can be said to any business owner in North America, on any Tuesday, forever, without ever being wrong.

Do you see why it sells so well?

The man sending the email isn’t lying to you. He has one test, the test always has something to say, and a quiet phone is a wound that badly wants a diagnosis.

And he never had to look at your business to write it. He ran a free tool against a list of addresses, pasted the worst-looking number into a template, and sent it to a few hundred owners before breakfast.

How personal did that email feel when it landed? Read it again and count how many sentences could only have been written about you.

Quick is not the same as good

The part that stops people arguing with me is everything else I checked.

Fourth on speed, and 15th of 24 once all ten of my checks are added up, on a total of 72 out of 100. Middling. Unremarkable. A perfectly ordinary city with unusually quick pages.

Those quick pages also finish dead last of 24 on whether they fit the phone they arrive on, which is a strange pair of results to hold at once.

Nobody in this city set out to build fast websites. They came out fast because not very much got hung off them, which is an accident of restraint rather than a decision anyone made, and it is the easiest thing in the world to throw away.

And a rebuild is the surest way I know to lose that. New sites arrive heavier than the ones they replace, almost every single time, because the things clients get excited about in a mockup are the things that weigh the most.

A video across the top. A booking widget. A chat bubble that follows you down the screen. Two font libraries, because the designer liked one and the developer liked the other.

Then, six months later, the same agency offers to sell you a performance package.

Have you ever seen a redesign proposal that promised the site would get lighter? I’ve lost jobs to those proposals, and not one of them offered to take anything away.

What I’d look at instead

Not the stopwatch, and not the score I’m quietly pleased about on your behalf.

I’d want to know what happens in the thirty seconds after she lands. Whether she can tell at a glance what you actually sell, and to whom. Whether the last person who wanted to hire you found what she needed, or wandered off and rang the next name on the list without either of you ever knowing about it.

None of those questions turns up on a speed report, which is most of the reason speed reports are so popular in the first place. They answer something a stranger can check about you in ten seconds without ever speaking to you.

The one thing, if the itch won’t go

It usually doesn’t go. Someone plants that worry in your head and it sits there for months, resurfacing every time a week goes by without the phone doing anything interesting.

So spend an hour on your photographs, and nothing else.

Find the biggest picture on your homepage. Ask whoever looks after the site what that file actually weighs, and whether it’s being served at the size it’s displayed at or at the size it came off the camera. Those two are rarely the same, and the difference is usually most of your load time.

Then have them save it again, properly, without wrecking it. Med spas hear the same advice from me in the same order, because the gallery is the fix there, not the website.

I keep a longer list of what really shifts a load time, and photographs sit at the top of it by a distance that nothing else on the list comes anywhere near.

When I take on a website in this city, the pictures get opened first, and they’re usually the only speed work on the entire job.

Everything else above? Let it go. The ranking, the grade, the bands, the email in your inbox. None of it needs a single thing from you.

Go and look at your biggest photo tonight. Then go and do something that has nothing whatsoever to do with your website, and let the circle stay whatever color it likes.