Site speed: why it matters and how to check the developer

Speed is not an SEO extra you bolt on later. It is whether a person sees the offer while they still have any patience left. On a phone. On an ordinary connection. Without you explaining that the site is actually fast and the hosting is just in a mood today.

The check is free. The tool is Google Lighthouse. The simplest way for an owner to open it is PageSpeed Insights, at pagespeed.web.dev. Paste the address. Read the Mobile result, not only the desktop one. A perfect desktop score often hides a phone experience that falls apart. Your customers are on the phone.

The report gives four scores from 0 to 100: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. Next to them is LCP, the moment the main content actually appears. My delivery bar is 95+ on mobile in each of the four categories, and an LCP under 2 seconds. I also hold CLS under 0.05, so the page does not jump while it loads, and INP under 200 ms, so a tap does not feel stuck. That is not decoration for an about block. It is a condition to put on the table before the final payment.

Ask the developer for the report on the staging address, before you connect the domain and close the invoice. A solid answer is short: here is the mobile run, here is the LCP, here is what we removed to get there. A weak answer is short too. "It depends on the hosting." A screenshot from a desktop only. Or a score from a plugin that grades itself.

Heavy template sites miss this bar all the time. A theme, a full-width slider, three widgets, a pile of plugins, fonts pulled from three different places. The phone downloads all of that before the offer is on screen. The page just sits there. The visitor does not read your advantages. They close the tab. I will not draw you a fairy tale about a percentage of traffic lost. Without a report on your URL, that number would be fiction. Open the report and look.

I build the public page on Next.js. Not on a theme where speed is a side effect of twenty plugins. Less borrowed code on the first screen, fewer surprises in the mobile run. The 95+ bar is part of delivery for me, not a separate service called "we will optimize next month." The figure on my own site means that bar. It is not a magic screenshot that travels from one portfolio to the next.

Before you compare two contractors on price, compare two mobile reports. A cheap template that misses this bar is not the cheaper buy. You pay for it with the time of people who left before the page showed up at all. If a contractor cannot show the report, you already have the answer. Find one who can.