You test your website on the office Wi-Fi, on a good phone, after visiting it a hundred times. It looks instant. Your buyer sees something else.
Your buyer is in a cab on the Outer Ring Road, or in the basement car park of their office, or in a PG room in Gachibowli where the signal drops to one bar. They tapped a link from a WhatsApp forward or a Google search. They have three brokers' sites open at once. The one that shows the flat first gets the call.
Why speed matters twice
Speed matters to people first. A visitor staring at a white screen does not wait politely. They go back and tap the next result. You never see this happen, because nobody calls to say your site was slow so they left.
Speed matters to Google too. Google measures how real visitors experience pages, using a set of measurements it calls Core Web Vitals. In plain words, they cover three things:
- How quickly the main content, usually the big photo or the heading, appears
- How quickly the page responds when someone taps a button or a link
- Whether things jump around while loading, so people tap the wrong thing
Google's guidance treats the main content appearing within about two and a half seconds as good. Speed is only one of many things Google weighs, and a fast site with nothing useful on it will not rank. But a slow site makes everything else harder.
What usually slows a property site down
Property sites have a particular problem: they are full of photos. Most slowness comes from a short list of culprits:
- Photos uploaded straight from a phone camera, several megabytes each, when the screen needs a small fraction of that
- A full-screen video on the home page that starts downloading the moment the page opens
- A slider with eight large images, of which the visitor sees one
- Chat widgets, pop-ups and several tracking tools, each loading its own code
- Fonts fetched from another company's servers
- A page that loads all forty listing photos at once instead of as the visitor scrolls
None of these are needed for a buyer to see a flat and call you. Every one of them costs time on a weak signal.
How to check your own site
You do not need special tools for a first answer.
Take your phone off Wi-Fi and use mobile data. Open a private tab so the site is not already stored on the phone. Now open your home page and one listing page, and notice how long it takes before you see the property photo and the price. Then do it again somewhere the signal is weak, like a basement or a lift lobby. That is what many of your visitors live with.
For a more formal check, search for Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool and enter your site's address. Look at the mobile result, not desktop. If it shows data from real visitors to your site, trust that more than the test score. The report lists what is slowing the page down, in reasonably plain language, so you can hand it to your developer.
Fixes you can make this week
Some fixes need your developer. Several you can do yourself:
- Resize photos before uploading. Around 1,600 pixels wide is plenty for a listing photo, and free phone apps can resize a whole batch at once.
- Remove the home page video, or make sure it shows a still photo first and does not download on mobile data. The guide to video walkthroughs covers using video without weighing the page down.
- Remove chat widgets and pop-ups that nobody uses. A WhatsApp button is a simple link and costs almost nothing.
- Cut the slider down to one strong photo.
- Keep the enquiry form short, because long forms are painful on a phone; see why the shortest enquiry form wins.
Then ask your developer three questions. Do photos further down the page load only when the visitor scrolls to them? Are images resized automatically for phones? Do pages arrive from the server already complete, or are they assembled on the phone afterwards? That last one affects speed, and also whether Google and AI tools can read the page at all.
Good photos, light files
None of this means fewer or worse photos. Buyers want photos, and good ones win enquiries. It means sending each photo at the size the screen actually needs. A sharp, well-lit photo resized properly looks just as good on a phone and arrives far sooner. For taking those photos in the first place, see property photos on a phone.
The broker whose flat appears first, on a bad signal, in a moving cab, is the broker who gets the call. Make sure that is you.
