www.goguardian.com speed test — 20 Oct 2026

What these numbers mean

• The first byte arrived in 253 ms. That is workable, and the cheapest win left is caching or a warmer connection.
• The page transfers 310.5 KB over 26 request(s). Images files are 80% of it, so resize and recompress the largest images before anything else.
• The HTML itself arrives gzip-compressed.
• It runs over HTTP/3, so the assets share a connection instead of opening one each.
• 80% of the weight comes from other hosts (analytics, fonts, embeds), which also means their slow day becomes your slow day.
• The largest element painted at 1.68 s, inside the 2.5 s Google calls good.
• Layout stayed still (CLS 0.002), so nothing jumps under the reader's cursor.
• The main thread was blocked for 426 ms, so taps and scrolling wait while scripts run.

Fix first: Third-party weight - Self-host the libraries you can, drop the tags you cannot justify, and preconnect the ones you keep.

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.