Does Your Website Load Fast Enough? Island Internet Edition

Let's be honest: Whidbey internet can be spotty. Cell service drops in pockets. Even home internet isn't always blazing fast, especially in remote areas.

Which means if your website is slow to load, you're creating an even bigger problem for island visitors and locals alike.

Why Speed Matters

People are impatient. If your website takes more than a few seconds to load, they're gone. They don't wait around wondering if their connection is bad or if your site is just slow—they move on to the next option.

For businesses competing for tourist dollars or local clients, a slow website is leaving money on the table.

The Biggest Speed Killer: Images

Most slow websites have one thing in common: huge, unoptimized images.

You take a beautiful photo with your phone—maybe it's your storefront, your pottery, your vacation rental view. You upload it directly to your website. And that photo is 5MB, which is massive for a web page.

Your phone camera creates high-resolution images perfect for printing, but total overkill for screens. A website image rarely needs to be more than 200-300KB — if it’s a good image to begin with.

How to Fix It

Before uploading images to any website builder (Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, etc.):

Resize them. Images for the web don't need to be more than 2000 pixels wide, and often 1200 pixels is plenty. Use free tools like TinyPNG, Squoosh, or even Preview on Mac to resize.

Optimize them. Fortunately, most website platforms already do this for you or have the option.

Choose the right format. JPG for photos, PNG for graphics with text or transparent backgrounds. Both platforms handle this pretty well automatically, but it's good to know.

Other Speed Drains

Videos set to autoplay in the background eat bandwidth and slow loading. If you don't need it, cut it.

Too many apps or plugins can bog down your site. Every Instagram feed widget or animated counter adds loading time. Ask yourself: does this actually help my visitors, or does it just look cool?

Test Your Speed

Google "PageSpeed Insights" and plug in your URL. It'll give you a speed score and specific suggestions for improvement. You don't need a perfect score—just aim for "good" on mobile.

Wix also has a site speed assesment tool.

Or just pull out your phone, turn off WiFi, and load your site on cellular. If you're sitting there waiting, so are your customers.

The Whidbey Reality

You can't control island internet speeds. But you can control whether your website is lightweight enough to load quickly even on a mediocre connection.

Optimizing images takes an extra two minutes per photo. That's it. And it makes the difference between a visitor seeing your site and giving up, or calling your competitor instead.

Need help optimizing your website's speed? Let's chat.