Improve page speed and mobile experience

Choose the three pages that get the most paid or organic traffic. Run each through Google's PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile tab, not desktop. Write the results in a sheet: page, date, performance score and the three Core Web Vitals.

The thresholds I use for "good" are:

• Largest Contentful Paint, how long the main content takes to appear: 2.5 seconds or less.
• Interaction to Next Paint, how fast the page reacts to a tap: 200 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift, how much things jump around: 0.1 or less.

If you have a few weeks of real traffic, check the "field data" at the top of the report. It reflects real visitors. The lab score below it is a simulation.

Open the "Opportunities" and "Diagnostics" lists. Ignore the small items. On most marketing pages three things cause most of the delay: oversized images, third-party scripts and web fonts. Fix the biggest one, test again, then move on. Do not try to reach a score of 100. Reaching the green zone on mobile is the goal.

The hero image is usually the largest element and decides your Largest Contentful Paint. Resize it to the width it is actually shown at, compress it and use a modern format such as WebP or AVIF. A hero image under 200 KB is a sensible target. Set a width and height on every image so the page does not jump while loading. Load images below the first screen lazily, but never the hero itself.

Every chat widget, heatmap, pixel and font loader adds delay. List every tag in Google Tag Manager and ask of each one: who uses this, and when did they last look at it? Remove anything without an answer. Delay chat widgets until the visitor scrolls or taps. If your page runs three analytics tools, keep the one you actually read.

Use one or two font families and only the weights you need. Set the font to show a fallback straight away while the real one loads. Custom fonts that block text from showing are a common reason a page looks empty for a second.

Scores do not show how a page feels. Put the page on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi, and check:

1. The headline and button are visible without scrolling.
2. Text is readable without zooming, at 16 pixels or larger.
3. Buttons and links are at least 48 pixels tall with space between them.
4. The form opens the right keyboard: email for the email field, number pad for phone.
5. No sticky bar, cookie banner or chat bubble covers the main button.

For the next layer, watch real mobile sessions in Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar and look for repeated taps on things that do not respond.

Write down limits: hero image under 200 KB, no new script without an owner, mobile Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds. Check the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console once a month, as part of Run monthly landing page audits. Speed slips back quietly when someone adds a new widget.

• Testing only on a fast laptop and office wifi.
• Chasing the overall score instead of the three Core Web Vitals.
• Compressing the images and leaving ten tracking scripts untouched.
• Lazy-loading the hero image, which makes the main content appear later.
• Fixing the homepage while the paid landing pages stay slow.

Your three key pages pass the Core Web Vitals on mobile in the field data. Bounce rate on mobile falls and the mobile conversion rate moves closer to desktop. The message and layout side is covered in Optimise existing pages for mobile and message match. Speed gets people to see the page. That chapter makes them act.