A page that opens in a moment on office WiFi can take a long time on a busy mobile network, and every megabyte comes out of someone's prepaid bundle. Performance appears in Accra and remote adverts, and for products serving northern Ghana it often decides whether people use your site at all.
Measure first
Do not guess. Use free tools:
- Lighthouse, built into Chrome DevTools, scores a page and lists what to fix.
- PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) runs similar checks from the web.
- Network throttling in DevTools lets you simulate a slow connection, and CPU throttling simulates a slower phone.
Watch the total page weight in the Network tab. Smaller is almost always better.
Images: the biggest win
Images are usually the heaviest part of a page.
<img src="kente-600.webp"
srcset="kente-400.webp 400w, kente-800.webp 800w"
sizes="(min-width: 700px) 50vw, 100vw"
width="600" height="400"
loading="lazy" alt="Kente cloth on display">- Resize images to the size they are shown. A phone does not need a photo several thousand pixels wide.