Trade site speed check

Most trades websites get built and tested on a laptop, on office wifi, by someone sitting still. Most visitors arrive on a phone, on mobile data, standing in a cold hallway with a leak behind them. Those are very different conditions, and a site that feels instant on the laptop can genuinely lose people on the phone before it's even loaded.

How to test it properly

Turn wifi off on a phone so it's forced onto mobile data — that's the real-world condition most visitors are in. Load the site fresh (not from a cached tab) and time roughly how long it takes to feel usable, not just show a blank screen. Then try tapping the main buttons and links with a thumb, one-handed, the way someone holding a phone in a doorway actually would — anything that needs a precise fingertip tap is a tap target problem. Check whether the phone number is a visible, tappable link that opens the dialler directly, not just text in an image or a number that needs copying. Finally, try filling in the contact form one-handed, without switching to two hands — if that's awkward, it's costing enquiries.

A worked example

A site that loads in 3.2 seconds on mobile data (20 points, in the "needs improvement" band), with comfortably-sized buttons (20 points), a tappable click-to-call number (20 points), but a contact form that needs zooming in to use (0 points): 60 out of 100. The load time and the form are the two to fix first — they're the ones most likely to lose someone before they ever reach the phone number.

What this isn't

This is a manual, one-off check on one phone and one connection — real-world load time varies by signal strength, device age and time of day, and a proper audit would test across several conditions. It also doesn't measure accessibility for screen readers or produce the kind of detailed diagnostic report a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights gives. Use it as a quick sanity check, and treat a low score as a reason to look closer, not a final verdict.