Is your website losing customers on island data? A speed checklist

Here is a test that takes two minutes. Turn off the wifi on your phone. Walk outside. Open your own website.

If you are in downtown Nassau on a good day, it probably loads. Now imagine your customer in Rock Sound, or at the marina in Marsh Harbour with one bar of signal, or a visitor on a roaming plan trying to find your restaurant. For them, a site that takes eight seconds on wifi takes thirty, and they have given up long before that.

Speed is not a technical nicety. It is the difference between a customer and a lost one, and in The Bahamas the margin is thinner than almost anywhere else, because connections are slower and more expensive than the places most websites are built for.

How to test properly

On your phone, on data. Wifi off. Open the site. Count seconds until you can read and tap. Three is the limit.

PageSpeed Insights. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, enter your address, and look at the mobile score. Below 50 is a serious problem. Above 90 is where a well-built site should be. The report also lists exactly what is slow.

Throttled. In Chrome on a computer, open the developer tools, pick "Slow 4G" or "3G" under the network tab, and reload. This is what a Family Island connection feels like.

The four things that make Bahamian sites slow

1. Photos uploaded straight from the camera. A phone photo is 3 to 6 megabytes. A website needs it at 100 to 200 kilobytes, which is twenty to fifty times smaller, and it should be served in a modern format (WebP or AVIF) at the size the screen actually needs. One hero image done wrong can double your load time. Ten gallery photos done wrong make the page unusable on data.

2. Too many scripts. A typical WordPress site with a page builder, a slider, a chat widget, three fonts, a tracking pixel and a popup plugin loads dozens of files before it shows a word. Each one is a round trip across the ocean. Fewer is faster, and most of them are not doing anything for you.

3. Hosting far away with no edge. If your site lives on a cheap shared server in Europe, every request travels there and back. Putting a content delivery network (Cloudflare is free and excellent) in front of the site means the files are served from a location near your visitor. Your site should also be hosted on a fast server, not the cheapest plan the developer could find.

4. No caching. Caching means the browser and the network keep a copy of files that do not change, so the second page loads instantly. Many sites have it switched off or misconfigured.

What fast looks like

A site built properly for island conditions:

• Loads the text and the first image in under a second on 4G
• Weighs a few hundred kilobytes per page, not several megabytes
• Serves images in modern formats, sized for the screen
• Loads only the scripts it needs, and loads them after the content
• Sits behind Cloudflare or a similar network
• Scores 90 or higher on PageSpeed Insights, mobile

That is a reasonable thing to ask any developer for, and a reasonable thing to check before you pay.

Why Google cares too

Google measures the speed of every site through something called Core Web Vitals and uses it in rankings. A slow site is harder to find as well as harder to use. Fix the speed and you often see the search position move within weeks.

If yours fails the test

Some of this can be patched on an existing site: compress the images, remove the plugins, add Cloudflare. If the site is on an old theme with a page builder, patches only go so far, and a rebuild on a modern, lean foundation is cheaper than you think.

Every 7-Day Bold Rebuild is built mobile-first, tested on a throttled connection before launch, and hosted on fast servers behind Cloudflare. If you would like to see how fast your site could be, send it over and we will show you.