The website speed scorecard: score your site in an hour

Key takeaways

The GBL Speed Experience Scorecard rates a website on five things a customer can feel: Arrive, Respond, Settle, Continue and Complete. Each is scored 0, 1 or 2 on a real phone over mobile data, giving a total out of 10. It takes about an hour, needs no technical knowledge and tells you which part of the journey to fix first.

• Arrive: is the first screen readable within 2.5 seconds?
• Respond: do menus, buttons and fields react at once when tapped?
• Settle: does the page stay still once you start reading?
• Complete: do forms, bookings and payments confirm within a second?
• 8 to 10 is fast where it counts. 4 or below is costing you customers.

What is a website speed scorecard?

A website speed scorecard is a short, repeatable test that rates how fast a site feels at each stage of a customer's visit, instead of reducing speed to a single technical score.

Automated tools tell you what a simulated phone recorded on one page. They do not submit your enquiry form, open your menu or try your booking widget. The scorecard covers the whole journey from search result to sent enquiry, which is where customers experience your speed and where most sites have never been tested.

• How website speed affects customer experience and conversions
• How to test website speed the way customers feel it

How do you score each of the five areas?

Score each area on your three most important landing pages, then take the lowest result. Use a mid-range phone, switch off Wi-Fi and clear the browser's stored data first, so you see what a first-time visitor sees.

• Arrive: 2 if the headline and main button appear within about 2.5 seconds, 1 if within 4, 0 if longer.
• Respond: 2 if every tap reacts at once, 1 if some lag, 0 if taps are ignored or need repeating.
• Settle: 2 if nothing moves after it appears, 1 if one shift, 0 if you mis-tap because of a jump.
• Continue: 2 if the next two pages are as quick as the first, 1 if slower, 0 if each feels like a fresh wait.
• Complete: 2 if the form or booking confirms within a second or shows progress, 1 if it pauses, 0 if you doubt it worked.

• Website slow to respond to taps and clicks? Causes and fixes
• Why your website jumps around while it loads
• Speed between pages: why the second click matters too

How do you check the score against real data?

Back up what you felt with field data. Enter each page into PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile tab. Where it shows real-user data, it reports Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) over the previous 28 days at the 75th percentile, meaning the experience of your slower visitors.

Arrive maps to LCP, Respond to INP and Settle to CLS. If a page scores 2 by hand but fails in field data, your phone or signal was better than your customers'. If the tool says pass and the page felt slow, trust what you felt and look at Continue and Complete, which the tool does not measure.

• Lab data vs field data: which speed numbers to believe
• Core Web Vitals for business websites

What does your total mean?

The total tells you how urgent the work is. The lowest single area tells you where to start.

• 8 to 10: fast where it counts. Protect it with a quarterly re-score.
• 5 to 7: quick in places but leaking enquiries. Fix the lowest area first.
• 4 or below: slow enough to cost customers every week. Start with Arrive.

• Website speed optimisation costs in the UK
• A 90-day plan to make your website faster

What are the limits of the scorecard?

The scorecard is a judgement on one phone on one day. It will not tell you the cause of a problem or give a precise measure, and two people may score a borderline page differently. It also rates speed only. A site can score 10 and still fail to win enquiries because the offer is unclear.

Use it to decide where to look, then use tools to find out why. For the wider question of whether a quick site is also a persuasive one, score conversion separately.

• The website conversion scorecard: good or high-converting?
• The mobile readiness scorecard: score your site in an hour

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see when owners score their own site for the first time: Arrive gets a 2, because the homepage has been optimised, and Complete gets a 0. The enquiry form sits for several seconds with no feedback after Send is pressed, and nobody had noticed because staff never use it.

Fixing the form so that it confirms at once is often a small job with an outsized effect, because everyone it affects had already decided to get in touch. Across client work at Global Bridge Labs (GBL), we have seen a 2.4x enquiry rate from conversion changes like these.

• See client work
• Website Design & Development for UK businesses

Speed scorecard checklist

• Pick your three highest-traffic landing pages.
• Use a mid-range phone on mobile data with stored data cleared.
• Score Arrive, Respond, Settle, Continue and Complete from 0 to 2.
• Take the lowest result for each area across the three pages.
• Check LCP, INP and CLS field data in PageSpeed Insights.
• Fix the lowest-scoring area first and re-score in a month.

• Website speed checklist: twenty checks before you spend

Next step

An hour with a phone will tell you more about your website's speed than a year of automated reports. If you would like a second opinion on the score, or help with the fixes, we can do both.