Written by us · 4 September 2026

We checked three UK websites. One picture was costing 11.6 seconds.

We ran our free checker over three real UK websites. We have not worked for any of them and we have not spoken to them. We just measured. No names — we have not asked permission and will not use them without it.

1. A UK online shop

   Single homepage image weighs 2,266KB, where 140KB would do.

   11.6 seconds of blank screen on a slow phone connection, from one picture.

2. A UK subscription box

   Mobile hero image weighs 1,038KB, where 96KB would do.

   The first thing every mobile visitor waits for, five times heavier than it needs to be.

3. A UK homeware brand

   Homepage hero image weighs 559KB, where 88KB would do.

   Also blocks pinch-zoom, so nobody can look closely at a product before buying.

Here is the part worth sitting with

Not one of these businesses knows.

Nothing looks broken. The site loads fine on the owner's laptop, on office wi-fi, with everything already cached. The people it is failing are on a train, on a bus, in a queue, on three bars of signal — and they do not send an email to complain. They just leave, and you never find out they were there.

That is what makes this particular problem worth writing about. A broken checkout gets reported within the hour. A page that takes eleven seconds on a phone gets reported by nobody, ever, and quietly costs you customers for years.

What we are not going to do

We are new. We have no case studies and no testimonials, and we are not going to invent any. Plenty of people in this trade would have written the three findings above as “how we increased a client's conversion rate by 34%” and hoped nobody asked which client.

What we have is a checker that measures real numbers off real websites, and three examples of what it finds. That is it, and it is enough to be going on with.

Run it on your own site

It is free, it takes about ten seconds, and there is no account, no email and no card. If there is nothing wrong we will tell you that too.

Then tell us one thing you would change — a slow page, a heavy image, whatever has been bugging you — and we will build the fix so you can look at it. You can see it working. You cannot take it away and use it until you are a client. That is the whole offer, and there is nothing else to it.

Check my website Tell us one thing to build

Measurements taken with our own checker on 4 September 2026. Websites change — if you are one of the three and you have since fixed it, good, and we will happily say so. hello@voyagesystems.co.uk