A client’s online shop, run by a Scottish football club, looked great on a big screen in the office. On a phone it was a different story. When we tested it the way Google’s own tools test a site, as a mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection, the home page took between 39 and 56 seconds to show its main content.
Nobody waits 39 seconds. The club didn’t need a new website. It needed someone to find out where the weight was.
Where the 10 MB was going
The home page downloaded 9.5 MB. For comparison, the typical Dundee business home page in our Dundee Digital Benchmark is 1.7 MB, and our own recent builds come in at a fraction of that.
Almost all of it was five banner photos. They’d been saved as PNG files, a format meant for logos and flat graphics, not photographs. The largest was 2.5 MB on its own. Together they came to 6.9 MB, more than the whole of most websites.
It’s an easy mistake. Design tools often export as PNG by default, the photo looks perfect, and on office Wi-Fi nobody notices the cost.
What else we found
- An icon font weighing 455 KB, downloaded on every page, for 13 small icons: a basket, a padlock, a few arrows. It came bundled with a page-builder add-on and contained nearly 900 icons the site never used.
- Fonts loading from the site’s old test copy rather than the live site. It worked, until the day the test copy went away, at which point the live shop’s text would have quietly changed font.
- A section built to a fixed width of 1,512 pixels. Perfect on a large monitor. On a normal laptop it pushed the page sideways, with one of the product tiles hanging off the edge.
What we changed, and what we didn’t
We didn’t redesign anything, rebuild anything or change a single product. Visitors see the same shop.
- Images: the site now sends every photo in a modern format, to every browser that supports it, at a fraction of the size. We checked the originals and the new versions side by side, down to the fabric texture on the kit, and they’re indistinguishable. The five banners went from 6.9 MB to under half a megabyte.
- Icons: the site now loads only the 13 icons it actually uses. 455 KB became about 3 KB, and if anyone adds a new icon in future, the site switches back to the full set by itself overnight rather than showing a blank.
- Fonts and layout: everything now loads from the live site, and the oversized section fits every screen from a phone to a wide monitor.
The result
| Before | After | |
| Home page weight | 9.5 MB | 1.8 MB |
| Images | 8.1 MB | 0.9 MB |
| Time to show the main content (mid-range phone, slow 4G) | 39–56 seconds | 7.9 seconds |
We did the same the same week for two other shops we look after, a darts player’s site and a clothing brand. One went from 4.9 MB to 2.0 MB and now shows its main content in about 3 seconds on the same test. The other went from 3.3 MB to about 2.1 MB, where most of what’s left is tracking scripts the business relies on for its advertising.
What to take from it if you run a shop
- Slow usually doesn’t mean “needs a new website”. It usually means a handful of heavy files. Find them first.
- Photos should never be PNGs. If your banners are PNG files over half a megabyte, that’s almost certainly your biggest problem.
- Test on a phone, on mobile data, not on the office Wi-Fi.
- Page-builder add-ons bring baggage. Icon packs, sliders and animation libraries all add weight, often for one small feature.
- Check what your site loads from elsewhere. Anything still pointing at a test or old copy of your site is a problem waiting to happen.
If your shop feels slow and you’re not sure why, that’s exactly what our website speed work finds and fixes, without starting again. And if you’re planning a new shop, our ecommerce builds start light. Tell us what’s going on.
Got a problem like this? Good. We like those.
Tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll tell you honestly what we’d do.
