I found out mine was. It took less than two minutes, using a free tool called PageSpeed Insights.
I’ve been spending time lately on the behind-the-scenes work of making stacyderrickcreative.com easier to find online. SEO stuff. Not the most glamorous part of running a business, but it matters. And somewhere in that process, I ran my site through a free tool called PageSpeed Insights.
What I found surprised me.
What PageSpeed Insights actually is
It’s a free tool from Google. You go to pagespeed.web.dev, type in your website address, and hit Analyze. About 30 seconds later, you get a report that tells you how your site is performing on both mobile and desktop, and where the problems are.
It scores four things: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. Each one gets a score from 0 to 100.
The SEO score is the one most business owners want to look at first. But don’t ignore Performance. That’s where the real surprises tend to hide.
What I found on my own site
My SEO score came back at 100. That felt good.
My Performance score on mobile came back at 64. That did not.
The tool told me exactly why. My hero image, the headshot on my homepage, was loading at over 5 megabytes. That’s enormous for a web image. The browser was working hard to download all of that before the page could finish loading, and visitors were waiting.
Here’s the thing about slow-loading pages: people don’t wait. They leave. And Google notices.
What I did about it
The fix was straightforward once I knew what the problem was. I compressed the image and re-uploaded it. The file went from 5 megabytes down to 83 kilobytes. Same photo. Looks identical on the page. But the browser now has a fraction of the work to do.
I ran the report again. My Performance score went from 64 to 90.
What this means for you
If you have a website and you haven’t run it through PageSpeed Insights, I’d encourage you to do it today. It takes two minutes. It’s free. And it will show you things about your site that you can’t see just by looking at it.
Pay attention to the mobile scores specifically. Most people are finding your business on their phones. If your site is slow on mobile, you’re losing people before they even read a word you wrote.
You don’t have to fix everything at once. Start with whatever the tool flags as the biggest issue. In my case, it was one image. One image that had been quietly slowing things down since I launched.
Small fixes compound. That’s true in operations, and it turns out it’s true in websites too.
If you run the report and aren’t sure what you’re looking at, I’m happy to take a look with you. If you haven’t set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console, go ahead and do that now.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is PageSpeed Insights?
PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google that analyzes how fast your website loads on both mobile and desktop. It gives your site a score from 0–100 and tells you exactly what’s slowing it down — so you know what to fix instead of guessing.
Why does page speed matter for my small business website?
Google uses page speed as a ranking signal — slower sites rank lower. More importantly, most visitors will leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. For a small business, a slow site means losing potential clients before they ever read a word about you.
What’s a good PageSpeed score for a small business site?
A score of 70 or above on mobile is the baseline you want to hit. Above 90 is excellent. Most small business sites score in the 40–60 range on mobile because images haven’t been compressed — which is usually the fastest and biggest fix available.
How do I improve my PageSpeed score?
The single most impactful fix for most small business sites is compressing large images before uploading them. A hero image that’s 5MB can often be reduced to under 100KB without any visible quality loss. Tools like Squoosh (free, browser-based) make this a 2-minute task per image.
Stacy Derrick │ Founder, Stacy Derrick Creative, LLC │ stacyderrickcreative.com
If this was helpful and you want to support the work, you can buy me a coffee.
You may be wondering — did AI help write this? Yes, and I want to be upfront about that. The process, the client work, and the thinking behind every step are mine and they were worth reading before AI touched a word. AI just helped me pull it together more cleanly.
That is a system working the way it should.
Leave a Reply