We audited 218 Ahmedabad business websites

Every website audit we run in Ahmedabad turns up the same three problems, so we wanted to know how widespread they actually are. We screened 218 live business websites across the city, from restaurants and dental clinics to manufacturers, law firms and schools.

All 218 were checked for the technical and contact basics. A random sample of 100, spread across every category, went through Google Lighthouse on a simulated mobile connection. The results were worse than we expected, and the most costly problem turned out not to be speed at all.

What the numbers say

Google treats 2.5 seconds as the limit for Largest Contentful Paint, the moment the main content of a page appears. Anything beyond 4 seconds is classified as poor. Across the 95 Ahmedabad sites that returned complete Lighthouse results, the median was 8.1 seconds and the median performance score was 61 out of 100.

That is 88 of 95 sites. Sixty-nine percent sit in the poor band, 42 percent take more than ten seconds, and the slowest site in the sample needed 54 seconds to render its main content on a phone.

How slow is slow

The spread matters more than the average. These are the medians across the sample, measured on a simulated mobile connection.

1. Performance score: 61 of 100
   • Only 13 percent of sites scored above 90.
   • Twenty-two percent scored below 50, which Google treats as failing.
2. Largest Contentful Paint: 8.1 seconds
   • The threshold is 2.5 seconds.
   • Forty-two percent of sites took longer than ten seconds to show their main content.
3. Page weight: 2.8 MB
   • Forty-five percent ship more than 3 MB per page.
   • The heaviest homepage in the sample weighed 96 MB.

The problem nobody measures

Speed gets the headline because it is easy to measure. But the checks turned up something that costs local businesses far more enquiries, and almost nobody tracks it:

46 percent have no tappable phone number

Nearly half these sites give a mobile visitor no click-to-call link. The customer has to copy a number by hand, or leave. Most leave.

62 percent have no WhatsApp link

In a city where WhatsApp is the default business channel, most sites offer no way to start a chat.

33 percent have no analytics at all

A third of these owners have no way of knowing any of this is happening to them.

What is actually causing it

Uncompressed images and autoplay video.The single largest cost on nearly every slow site. Hero images exported straight from a design tool, and background video that loads before anything else can paint.

Theme and plugin bloat.Most slow sites load several plugin stylesheets and scripts the page never uses, plus jQuery that modern browsers no longer need.

Slow hosting.Thirty-four percent took more than 1.5 seconds just to return the first byte, before a single image loaded. No amount of design work fixes that.

Fixing it, in order

The fastest fixes are rarely the expensive or the complicated ones. In order of return:

• Add a click-to-call link and a WhatsApp link to every page header, which takes about fifteen minutes and is the highest-return change on this list;
• Compress and correctly size your images, usually a one hour job and the biggest speed win available;
• Install analytics, because you cannot fix what you cannot see.

Where your site stands

We ran this audit on our own homepage before publishing it and scored 39 out of 100, with a mobile LCP of 10.3 seconds. We are rebuilding that front end. We are not going to criticise other peoples load times and pretend ours are solved.

• Test: Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights on mobile;
• Check: Open it on a phone and try to call or message the business in one tap;
• Ask: Send us your URL and we will tell you which of these problems you have, free.