Most shoppers will see your website on a phone, often on a cell connection, often while comparing a few dealers at once. If your first photo and price show up quickly, you're in the comparison. If the screen sits blank, they tap back and try the next lot.
You don't need to be technical to check your own site. This checklist tells you how to test it, what to look for and what to ask your website provider. For the meaning behind the numbers, see Dealer website speed and Core Web Vitals, explained for owners.
Part 1: test it
- Go to PageSpeed Insights, Google's free speed test, and enter your home page address.
- Look at the mobile results first. That's what most shoppers see.
- Note whether there's a section for real-user data and whether it passes the Core Web Vitals check. Newer or smaller sites may not have enough visitors for this section.
- Write down the Performance score in the lab test below it.
- Run the test two more times. Mobile scores move from run to run, so write down the range, not one number.
- Repeat for one of your car pages and one search results page. Car pages are where shoppers decide.
Google's Web Vitals guide defines "good" for the three Core Web Vitals: the main content showing within 2.5 seconds, the page responding to a tap within 200 milliseconds and a layout shift score of 0.1 or less.
Part 2: photos
Car pages are full of photos, and photos are the most common reason they're slow.
- Are photos resized for the screen? A phone shouldn't download a photo sized for a big desktop monitor.
- Are they in a modern, smaller format such as AVIF or WebP?
- Does the first photo load right away, while photos further down wait until the shopper scrolls?
- Do photos have a set size, so the page doesn't jump when they appear?
Part 3: widgets and scripts
Chat tools, ad tags, trade-in tools, review badges and pop-ups each add code the phone has to download and run.
- List every widget on your site. Is each one still used?
- Do widgets load after the page is ready, instead of holding up the first view?
- Are there old tracking tags from ad campaigns you've stopped running?
- Is there a pop-up that covers the car the moment the page opens? It slows the page and annoys shoppers.
Part 4: how pages are built
- Are car pages built ahead of time and cached, or put together from scratch for every visitor? Cached pages show up faster.
- Is the site served from servers close to your shoppers, often called a content delivery network or edge network?
- Does the inventory update on a schedule without slowing pages down for shoppers?
- Does the search bar respond quickly when a shopper types?
Part 5: layout that stays put
- Does anything move while the page loads, like the price box sliding down as a banner appears?
- Do buttons like "Check availability" stay where the shopper is about to tap?
- Are fonts loaded so text doesn't flash or change size?
Part 6: no dead ends
- When a car sells, does its page lead to similar cars instead of an error?
- Do old web addresses send shoppers to the matching new page?
- Do all the buttons and forms actually work on a phone? Try sending one yourself.
Part 7: questions for your provider
- Can you show me PageSpeed Insights results for my home page and a car page, mobile and desktop, three runs each?
- How are photos resized and what format are they sent in?
- Which scripts load before the page is ready, and why?
- Are car pages cached, and how often does inventory refresh?
- What happens to a car's page after it sells?
Speed isn't everything
A fast page still needs good photos, a clear price and an easy next step. But speed is the part you can measure for free today, and slow pages make every other investment, including ads, work harder. When you pay for a click, you want the page to be there when the shopper arrives.
Where Frontlot fits
Frontlot sites are built new on a current web framework. Car pages and landing pages are built ahead of time and served from Vercel's edge network, photos are resized and sent as AVIF or WebP, widgets wait until the page is ready, and the site reloads your inventory feed every 15 minutes. Book a demo and we'll run the test with you.