metro.co.uk speed test — 20 Oct 2026

What these numbers mean

• The first byte arrived in 287 ms. That is workable, and the cheapest win left is caching or a warmer connection.
• The page transfers 672.5 KB over 26 request(s). Images files are 89% of it, so resize and recompress the largest images before anything else.
• The HTML itself arrives br-compressed.
• It runs over HTTP/3, so the assets share a connection instead of opening one each.
• The largest element painted at 600 ms, inside the 2.5 s Google calls good.
• Layout shift is 0.102 (good is under 0.1): something without a reserved size is loading late - an image, an ad, or a font swap.
• The main thread was blocked for 684 ms, so taps and scrolling wait while scripts run.

Fix first: Render-blocking resources - Add defer or async to scripts that do not change the first paint, inline the critical CSS, and load the rest with media="print" plus an onload swap.

Read on one shared server, not a visitor's phone: use it to compare pages against each other, not as a promise about every connection. We fix what these tests find.