⚡ Summary
Our site took 9.3 seconds to load on mobile — Google PageSpeed showed just 50 out of 100. We assumed it was our own code. The real cause turned out to be something else entirely — here's what we found and what we did.
Website speed is the kind of thing people notice too late: a visitor opens the page, waits a few seconds, and closes the tab. If you've ever typed "what is slowing down my website" into Google at 2am, this post is for you — that's roughly how we felt about our own site.
What the first website speed test showed
A website speed test through Google PageSpeed Insights came back with a mobile score of 50 out of 100. The main problem was LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — the moment when the largest visible element on the screen finally shows up for a real visitor. It's one of three Core Web Vitals Google uses to measure how fast a page actually feels. Ours was 9.3 seconds; Google considers anything under 2.5 seconds good.
We were looking in the wrong place
For two days we optimized our own code — compressed images, cleaned up CSS, moved scripts to the bottom of the page. Locally, LCP dropped under a second. On production, it stayed at 9.3.
The answer was buried in the detailed report: 1,253 of 2,880 kilobytes on the page, and over 5 seconds of processing time, came from a script called recaptcha__en.js — a reCAPTCHA widget inserted by Netlify itself (the hosting platform our site runs on), without async or defer, with zero lines of it in our own repository.
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LCP optimization, the parts that actually mattered
The fix was our own reCAPTCHA widget with our own keys instead of the hosting's built-in one — server-side verification stays exactly the same. In parallel we moved fonts to self-hosting (they used to load from Google Fonts, which cost almost 3 more seconds on a cold cache) and removed a font that was linked in the code but never once used in the CSS.
The result
Mobile PageSpeed went from 50 to 74, LCP dropped from 9.3 seconds to roughly one. Total Blocking Time fell from 630 to 70 milliseconds, and page weight from 2,880 to 1,307 kilobytes. Running a website speed test now takes a few seconds, and we check it regularly so the number doesn't quietly creep back up. It's not just a report number: speed is one of the factors in SEO promotion, and Google ranks a slow site lower.
The real takeaway here: before diving into website performance optimization on your own code, check what's actually loading on the live site first — sometimes the most expensive script isn't even yours. If your own site feels slow and you can't tell why, tell us — we'll run a technical audit and give you the honest picture.
The simplest way: message us on Telegram or get in touch.