A fast website on slow networks: the method that works in Africa

Most visits to a Cameroonian website come from a phone, often on 3G, sometimes at the edge of coverage. A site that takes eight seconds to appear is not slow: it is absent. Google knows this and ranks fast pages first; AI answer engines also prefer pages they can read without effort. Here is the method we apply so that a site loads in under two seconds on 3G, in Douala as in Paris.

Set a budget before designing

A fast site starts with a number: the maximum weight of a page on first load. We aim for 500 KB all included, with less than 100 KB of JavaScript. On real 3G, around 1 Mbit/s with latency, that budget gives a complete display in about two seconds. Every design decision is then measured against the budget, which avoids debates of taste.

Images: 80% of the weight, 80% of the gains

• The right format: WebP or AVIF halve to quarter the weight compared with JPEG at equal quality. A logo or a pictogram stays in SVG.
• The right size: a 4,000-pixel-wide photo displayed on a 390-pixel screen is waste. The site must serve several sizes and let the browser choose.
• The right moment: only the images visible on the first screen load immediately; the others wait until you scroll.
• Declared dimensions: each image reserves its space before it arrives, otherwise the page jumps during loading, which Google measures and penalises.

Fonts: two families, not five

Each font is a file to download before the text can be displayed. We limit ourselves to two or three families, loading only the weights used, in WOFF2 format, hosted on the site rather than at a third party. Text appears first in a system font, then switches without a jolt.

JavaScript: as little as possible

A showcase website does not need a full JavaScript application to display text and images. We generate pages as static HTML and add scripts only for real interactions: menu, form, theme. As a result, the browser displays the page as soon as it receives it, without waiting to execute code. That is the main difference between our approach and most sites built on WordPress or page builders.

Hosting: close and cached

Distance matters. A site hosted on a single server in Europe adds 150 to 300 milliseconds to every request from Cameroon. A content delivery network places a copy of the pages on points of presence in Africa, including Johannesburg, Lagos or Nairobi, and serves the page from the nearest one. Static pages are cached in full, so the second visit is almost instant.

What gets measured

Google summarises performance in three indicators, the Core Web Vitals:

We test every page under simulated 3G conditions before go-live, then with real Search Console data once the site is in production. A site that is fast on the agency’s fibre and slow at the client’s is not a fast site.

The most frequent mistakes

• The homepage carousel: five heavy images loaded at once, four of which nobody will see.
• The background video player: several megabytes before the first word.
• Stacked plugins: each WordPress plugin adds its scripts and styles, often on every page.
• Third-party widgets: chat, social feeds, interactive maps, each with its own tens of kilobytes.
• The “all-in-one” purchased theme: it ships the features of a thousand sites to use ten of them.

Fast and beautiful are not opposites

A performance budget forbids neither large photos nor careful typography: it forces choices. One strong, well-compressed image beats five average ones. The sites we design under website development and our selected work follow this discipline, with a 3G load under 1.5 seconds as a design benchmark.

Have your site measured

You have a site and do not know whether it is slow? Send us its address from the contact page: we measure it under 3G conditions and send back, within 48 hours, what weighs, what can be fixed in a few hours and what needs a redesign. Questions on redesign timelines and pricing are in our FAQ.