WHY YOUR SITE SCORES 30 ON MOBILE
The usual culprits behind a red mobile score, how to check yours in a minute, and what to fix first.
What the score actually measures
Google's Lighthouse test loads your page the way a mid-range phone on a slow mobile connection would, then times how long it takes before something useful appears, whether the page jumps around while it loads, and how long it stays frozen while scripts run. Your fast laptop on fibre hides all of this. Most of your customers aren't on your laptop.
The three numbers Google cares about most (its Core Web Vitals) have published targets:
- Largest Contentful Paint: the main content should appear within
2.5s. - Interaction to Next Paint: taps should respond within
200ms. - Cumulative Layout Shift: the page shouldn't jump. Keep it under
0.1.
The usual culprits
- Huge images. A 4 MB photo straight off a phone, shown 400 pixels wide. It's the most common problem, and the easiest to fix.
- Page builders and plugins. Every plugin adds code to every page, whether that page uses it or not. Twenty plugins means twenty bundles of code downloaded on every visit.
- Sliders and autoplay video above the fold. Heavy, slow to settle, and rarely clicked.
- Too many fonts. Each weight is a separate download. Three families in five weights is fifteen files.
- Third-party widgets. Chat bubbles, review badges, tracking pixels and map embeds all load their own code from someone else's server.
Check yours in a minute
Run the free scan on our homepage, or go to pagespeed.web.dev and paste your address. Look at the mobile tab, not desktop.
What to fix first
- Resize and convert images to WebP at the size they're actually shown.
- Delete plugins you don't use, then the ones you barely use.
- Cut fonts down to the weights the design actually uses.
- Load chat widgets and embeds only when someone needs them.
- Give images and embeds fixed dimensions so the page stops jumping.
Those five usually move a site from red to orange. Getting to a reliable green 90+ normally means rebuilding the heaviest pages without the bloat, which is exactly what a revamp is for.