You tested it on the best connection in the state
Every website feels fast to the person who built it. Their browser has the images cached, they are on the office network, and they already know where everything is on the page.
Your customer has none of that. First visit, no cache, on a phone, on whatever signal exists where they are standing. In this state that gap is not a rounding error.
What the state's own numbers say
The Alaska Broadband Office's Five-Year Action Plan counts 389 communities in the state. Of those, 95 communities, 24.4%, can reach 100/20 Mbps at a minimum of 80% of their broadband serviceable locations. Another 101, 26.0%, have funded projects underway to get there. And 171 communities, 44.0% of the state, are classed as unserved, meaning they cannot reach even 25/3 Mbps.
That is a state document describing its own infrastructure, not a vendor pitching a speed audit. Nearly half the communities in Alaska cannot get a connection that the rest of the country stopped considering broadband years ago.
Anchorage is not most of those communities. But a lot of your customers, suppliers and referrers are, and the person deciding whether to call you is doing it on that connection.
The three numbers Google actually measures
Google does not grade you on a lab score. It grades you on what real visitors experienced, using three metrics with published thresholds:
- Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds. How long until the main thing on screen appears.
- Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds. How long the page takes to respond when somebody taps.
- Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. How much the page jumps around while loading.
The part that matters most is how it is scored: at the 75th percentile of real page loads, split across mobile and desktop. Your fastest three quarters of visits do not save you. One visitor in four has to be having a good time, and the slow quarter is exactly the group we have been talking about.
Where the weight actually is
In roughly the order we find it, on real sites:
Images, almost always
A photo straight off a phone is four to eight megabytes. Displayed in a box 800 pixels wide, it needs about 150 kilobytes. We regularly open a homepage carrying twelve megabytes of images that should weigh under one. Correct format, correct dimensions, lazy loading below the fold. This one fix is usually most of the win.
A hero video nobody watches
Autoplaying background video is the most expensive decoration in web design. It is often bigger than the entire rest of the page, and on a slow connection it delays the thing the visitor came for. Cut it on mobile at minimum, and be honest about whether it earns its cost on desktop.
Fonts
Four weights of two families, loaded from a third-party host, is a request chain before a single word can render. Two weights, self-hosted, preloaded. Nobody has ever left a site because it had one fewer font weight.
Third-party scripts
Chat widgets, review carousels, tracking pixels, a booking embed, three analytics tools nobody reads. Each is a request to somebody else's server, and their bad day is your slow page. Audit them annually and delete the ones nobody can name a use for.
The layout shift problem is a courtesy problem
The third metric is the one people ignore, and it is the one that makes a site feel cheap.
A page that reflows while loading, pushing the button down half a second after you reached for it, is a page that made you tap the wrong thing. On a slow connection that window is not half a second, it is four. The fix is dull: give every image and embed explicit dimensions so the browser reserves the space before the content arrives.
How to test like your customer
- Open your site in a private window on your phone, off wifi, on cellular. Do it somewhere with two bars, not in the office.
- Run PageSpeed Insights and read the field data section at the top, not the lab score below it. The field data is real visitors. The lab score is a simulation.
- In desktop browser dev tools, throttle the network to a slow profile and reload. This is the closest you will get to a customer in a village on satellite.
- Time how long until you can read the phone number. That number is the one that matters commercially.
What we do about it
The sites we build ship as static files, which means there is no server assembling a page while somebody waits. Images are converted and sized during the build rather than uploaded at full resolution and scaled down in the browser. Fonts are self-hosted and preloaded. There is no third-party script on the page that is not doing a job somebody can name.
None of that is exotic. It is just decisions made at build time instead of apologized for later. If your existing site is the problem, speed optimization is something we do on sites we did not build, and it is usually cheaper than a rebuild.