Eleven seconds on 4G, and what it costs

Open the network panel on most Indian business websites built before 2015 and the total transfer for the home page lands somewhere between 6 and 12 megabytes. Almost all of it is images: photographs uploaded at whatever size the camera produced, scaled down in the browser rather than on the server.

At a realistic 4G throughput of around 6 Mbps, 8.4 MB takes roughly eleven seconds to arrive. Google and SOASTA's benchmark research puts mobile abandonment at 53 percent once a page passes three seconds. Eleven seconds is not a slow page. It is an empty page, because most of the people who requested it have already gone.

Why this hits Indian businesses harder

Two things compound here. The first is that a large share of enquiry traffic arrives on a phone rather than a desktop, often on a connection that is nominally 4G and practically much less. The second is that the buyer is frequently on the move, on a factory floor, or in a market where the connection drops between one screen and the next.

A site built to be viewed on an office desktop over a leased line has no margin for any of that.

Where the weight actually sits

• Uncompressed photographs. A 4 MB JPEG displayed at 600 pixels wide. Resizing and re-encoding usually removes 90 percent of the bytes with no visible change.
• A slider carrying six full screen images, all loaded before anything is shown, and most never seen.
• Fonts and scripts loaded from four different third party domains, each one a separate connection.
• A PDF preview embedded on the home page.

What good looks like

A rebuilt home page for this kind of business should land under 900 KB in total, including the first video or hero image. Largest contentful paint under two seconds on a 4G connection. That is not an aspiration, it is an ordinary target, and it is measurable in about thirty seconds by anyone with a browser.

You can check your own figure with the calculator on the home page. Enter the transfer size from your browser's network panel and it will tell you roughly how long a 4G visitor waits.

Part of the standard Buildgin audit. The findings are yours whether or not you hire us for the rebuild.