South Africans browse on mobile data that costs real money, on networks that have bad days. A slow site here does not just annoy people, it filters them out before they see your offer.
The usual suspects
- Page builder bloat. Drag-and-drop builders ship megabytes of code your visitors never use. Convenient for the builder, expensive for the visitor.
- Unoptimised images. A 4MB hero photo straight off a phone is still the most common mistake we see.
- Cheap hosting. R49-a-month shared hosting puts you on a server with five hundred neighbours.
- Plugin pile-up. Every plugin is code that loads on every visit. Most sites we audit run twice as many as they need.
What good looks like
Google measures what it calls Core Web Vitals: how fast the page paints, how soon you can interact, whether things jump around while loading. Pass those and you are faster than most of your competitors, because most sites fail. Every build we ship passes before launch.
The quick wins
Compress your images, remove plugins you cannot explain, and test your own site on your phone using mobile data instead of office wifi. If it makes you wince, your customers winced first. A proper rebuild fixes it permanently; the registry shows what that looks like, and a good brief is where a rebuild starts.