Google gives every business a free report card on its website. Most owners have never opened it. Here is our score, and here is how to get yours in about ninety seconds.
Google publishes a free report card on your website. It takes about ninety seconds to run and most business owners have never opened it.
Go and run it now, then come back. pagespeed.web.dev. Paste in your own web address. Press Analyze.
What this site scores
Delcaro Media, tested on the same tool, on the same day.
Desktop: Performance 97, Accessibility 100, Best Practices 100, SEO 100.
Mobile: Performance 95, Accessibility 100, Best Practices 100, SEO 100.
Mobile performance is 95, not 100. I am not going to round it up. A hero animation costs a couple of points and I decided the animation was worth it.
The other three are 100 across both. Those are the ones that come from doing the work properly rather than from a trick.
What you probably scored
If your site runs on a page builder, a themed template, or a plugin stack, the mobile Performance number is very likely somewhere between 30 and 60.
That is not an insult aimed at you. It is the normal outcome of the way most sites get built. Every plugin adds code. Every template ships features you never use. Every stock image arrives at three times the size it needs. Nobody made a bad decision. The bad result is the sum of thirty small ones.
Check the mobile tab, not the desktop tab. Desktop flatters everyone. Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so mobile is the number that counts.
Who actually cares about this
Google cares. Page speed is part of how Google ranks pages. When two businesses answer the same question equally well, the faster page wins. In a small market that is often the whole difference between position three and position eight.
Your customers care, without knowing the word for it. They do not look at a score. They tap your number in the search results, wait four seconds on a weak signal outside a hardware store, and go back to the results page. You never learn that happened. It shows up as a quiet month.
AI tools now care too. Look at the new line on the report: Agentic Browsing. Both of ours read 2/2. That is Google checking whether an automated agent can actually read and use your site. As more people ask an assistant to find a plumber instead of scrolling a results page, a site machines cannot read stops existing.
Nobody else cares at all. Nobody has ever chosen a contractor because of a Lighthouse score. That is the honest part. The score matters because it decides who gets seen, not because anyone admires it.
The four numbers, in plain terms
Performance. How fast the page becomes usable. Under 50 is a problem. 90 and up is where you want to be on mobile.
Accessibility. Whether people using a screen reader, a keyboard, or larger text can use your site. Also a legal question in more places every year. This one is cheap to fix and there is no excuse for a low score.
Best Practices. Basic correctness. Secure connection, no broken image sizes, no ancient libraries with known holes in them.
SEO. Whether the basics are present. Titles, descriptions, readable links, a page Google can crawl. This is the floor, not a strategy. Scoring 100 here means nothing is broken. It does not mean you rank.
Three fixes that move the number most
If you want to improve it without rebuilding anything:
- Your images are too big. This is the single biggest cause of a slow small business site. A photo straight off a phone can be 4 MB. On a web page it needs to be under 200 KB. Resize and compress every image on the site.
- You are loading plugins you do not use. Every one adds code to every page. Deactivate and delete anything you cannot name a reason for.
- Your fonts are blocking the page. Three custom font families with six weights each will hold up the first paint. Two weights is plenty.
Those three usually take a site from the 40s into the 70s. Getting past 90 normally means the platform itself is the limit. That is a different conversation, and I have written about it.
Why our number is what it is
No page builder. No plugin stack. Every page is coded for this business, so the browser only downloads what the page actually uses.
Every client site I build gets tested the same way before launch, on mobile, on a throttled connection. A site that only performs on my office wifi is not finished.
Send me your score
Run the test. If the mobile number embarrasses you, send me a screenshot and the web address. I will tell you which two things are causing most of it, and whether it is worth fixing or worth replacing.
No charge, and I will say plainly when the answer is "leave it alone".
jon@delcaromedia.com or 250-977-5565.
Scores above: Google PageSpeed Insights, www.delcaromedia.com, 12 August 2026.