Most of your visitors are on a phone

Take your phone off the office wifi and put it on mobile data. Search your firm's name in Google, tap through to your own website, and count to thirty while you watch what it does.

Almost no principal has done this. They see their site on a 27-inch monitor at their desk, where it looks perfectly respectable, because that is the screen it was built for. The applicant deciding whether to enquire is holding a phone at a bus stop with one bar of signal.

What the thirty seconds tells you

Everything arrives tiny. The logo is a postage stamp and the body copy is a grey smudge. Your thumb goes to pinch and spread before you have consciously decided to. That is a fixed desktop page being shrunk to fit a six-inch screen. The site does not know it is on a phone and has made no attempt to find out.

You read a listing, then drag sideways to finish the sentence. Zooming in to read is bad enough. Having to pan left and right for every line means the visitor is now operating your website rather than reading it. Most people will do that for a property or two before they go back to the portal results and tap the next agent down.

The screen stays white, then the photos crawl in. A hero image arriving in bands, then a layout that jumps about as things land in it. On the office fibre connection nobody notices. On mobile data on a weekday afternoon, the visitor is looking at nothing at all for the first few seconds.

The phone number does nothing when you tap it. On an old site the number is often just text sitting in an image or a header, so tapping it has no effect. The visitor has to memorise it, leave your site, open the keypad and type. A fair number of them do not bother.

Why an old site does this deliberately

There is usually a single line of code behind it. Open your site on a desktop, right-click, choose "View page source", and search the text for the word "viewport". On sites built before roughly 2016 you often find this:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=1025">

That is a written instruction to every phone that visits: pretend your screen is 1025 pixels wide and render the full desktop page anyway. It was a reasonable choice in 2013, when the alternative was a separate mobile site nobody wanted to maintain. Today it means every phone visitor gets handed a page built for a desk and is left to pinch their way around it.

A responsive site has no fixed width at all. The same page reflows to whatever it finds, so three columns become one and the property grid becomes a stacked list you can scroll with one hand.

The arithmetic of who is leaving

Semrush measured Rightmove's UK traffic at 62.87% mobile and 37.13% desktop in February 2026. That is the closest thing there is to a picture of how the British public actually looks at property, and roughly six in ten of them are doing it on a phone.

Now put that against load time. Assume, conservatively, that half of those phone visitors give up on a page that takes more than three seconds to show them anything.

Say your site takes 400 visits in a month, which is unremarkable for a small firm with a decent local reputation. If your split looks anything like the portal's, around 250 of those visits are phones. If your site is over the three-second mark, that assumption puts something in the region of 125 of them gone before they see a single property. None of them ring to complain, and none of them fill in the contact form to say the site was slow. They just go, and your analytics, if anyone ever looks at it, records a visit.

That is arithmetic on one published figure and two assumptions. Nobody has measured your firm. The shape of it is the point: the people you lose this way are invisible, which is exactly why the problem survives for a decade.

It matters most at the top of the funnel. An applicant who has already met you will put up with a bad website. A stranger who found you through a search at half past nine at night will not, and that stranger is the one who might have taken the unit that has been sitting empty since March. The true cost of an empty unit makes a slow homepage look like an expensive economy.

Where the weight comes from

Property sites are photographs, and photographs are where the megabytes live. Images come off a camera or a handset at a size intended for printing, get uploaded exactly as they are, and then get squashed down by the browser on the visitor's end after it has already downloaded every pixel. A gallery of twenty of those on one page is a slow page, no matter how fast your hosting is.

The rest is usually accumulation. A rotating banner nobody has read since the year it went in. Four or five tracking scripts still firing on every page load for marketing arrangements that ended years ago, plus a stack of plugins added one at a time, each loading its own code whether the page uses it or not. None of that was a bad decision on its own. Together they are why the site takes seven seconds.

The fix is unglamorous. Images get resized and served at the size the screen actually asks for, in a format from this decade, and the dead scripts come out. Then the page is rebuilt so the text arrives first and the photographs fill in behind it, which gives the visitor something to read while the pictures land. On a site that has never had this attention, that is often the difference between several seconds and under one.

What that does and does not buy you

A fast, phone-shaped site keeps the visitors you are already paying to attract, and it makes your own listings readable on the device most people use. That is worth having.

It does not get you out of Rightmove or Zoopla. Nobody can do that. It will not make anyone in your office answer an enquiry faster either; we can build the form and route the alert to the right inbox in seconds, but somebody there still has to reply. And if you cannot change a word on the site yourself, sort that out before you worry about speed. It is worth reading about separately.

Run the thirty seconds on your own phone before you do anything else. If it fails on any of the four, tell us what it did. We will come back with what fixing it costs and how long it takes.