In July I stop judging websites from a desktop in an office. I open them on a phone, outside, on a normal 4G connection. That is how a lot of Kent and Sussex customers will see you in summer: one hand, sun on the screen, and a reason to leave if the page stalls.
A site that looked fine in March can fail in July. Hero videos, uncompressed photo galleries and forms that need a lot of JavaScript are the usual culprits. None of that is a design opinion. It is whether someone can book a table or request a quote before the drink arrives.
What I test first
- Largest Contentful Paint on a mid-range Android over 4G. If the main image is still blank after a couple of seconds, most people hit back.
- The tap targets. Phone numbers, "Book" and "Get a quote" need to be easy to hit with a thumb. Tiny footer links do not count.
- The form on mobile. If it asks for ten fields before a name and a number, it will not get finished in a beer garden.
- Whether the form actually sends. I still find sites where the contact form only works in the designer's browser.
Fixes that do not need a full rebuild
You do not always need a new website in July. You often need to stop shipping megabytes of image to a phone.
- Compress the homepage images. Serve WebP or AVIF, set width and height so the layout does not jump, and lazy-load anything below the first screen.
- Remove autoplay video from the hero unless you have measured that it helps. A still photo with a clear headline is faster and usually clearer.
- Put a click-to-call button in the header on mobile. For trades and restaurants, the phone number is the conversion.
- Keep the first form short: name, email or phone, and what they need. Collect the rest once you are in a conversation.
Core Web Vitals without the jargon
Google uses Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift as part of ranking and as a quality signal. In practice: the main thing should appear quickly, buttons should respond when tapped, and the page should not leap about while it loads.
I use PageSpeed Insights and a real phone, not only the lab score. A "green" desktop score can still hide a painful mobile experience. If you only have time for one test this week, do the phone test on 4G.
When a rebuild is the honest answer
If the site is a heavy WordPress theme with a slider plugin, a popup plugin and a page builder, patching images will only go so far. That is a performance problem baked into the stack. I build on Next.js because I can keep pages lean and still give you a CMS you can edit.
I will not claim a universal conversion lift from a speed fix. I will say this: if the page never finishes loading, there is no conversion to measure. Make the phone experience work, then argue about colours.
