Currawong Web
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Your homepage is too heavy — why it crawls on mobile data

A homepage that weighs several megabytes loads instantly on the office computer where it was approved — and takes long, blank seconds on a visitor's phone on regional mobile data.

The weight almost always hides in the same place: photos uploaded straight from a camera or phone at full resolution.

Why it costs you customers

Visitors decide whether to wait within a few seconds. A blank screen at second four is a closed tab, not a patient customer.

For businesses in tourist and country towns the irony is sharp: your best customers — travellers on patchy mobile coverage — get the worst version of your site.

Speed is also a Google ranking factor on mobile.

Check it in 30 seconds

Open your site on a phone using mobile data (not wifi) and count the seconds honestly.

Our free check reports your homepage HTML size; for a full picture, Google PageSpeed Insights breaks down every file.

How to fix it

Photos: the 80% fix

Resize images to the size they display (usually ≤1600px wide) and export as compressed JPEG or WebP. A 6MB photo becomes 180KB with no visible difference on a phone.

Lazy-load below the fold

Add loading="lazy" to images further down the page (platforms and modern themes often do this automatically) so the first screen wins the race.

Cut the dead weight

Auto-playing videos, unused sliders and five embedded widgets each add seconds. If a section does not earn bookings, it is costing them.

From our own site checks

Test on 4G in a car park, not on your NBN. Every heavy site we have flagged "felt fast" to its owner — because owners always visit on wifi with the page already cached. Your newest customer never does.

Wondering what else your site is quietly costing you?

Run our free 20-point health check — it tests this and 19 other things in about ten seconds. No signup, nothing stored.

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