profile

Hey, I'm Amber

Cycle 19: bricks in the trunk

Published about 1 month ago • 3 min read
This week's teardown  ·  Take out the bricks

Your site isn't underpowered. The trunk is full of bricks.

Hey Reader,

Quick question: when did you last open your own website on your phone, with the wifi off, and actually count the seconds until it loaded?

That's the connection a lot of your customers are on. And if you're tapping your foot waiting, so are they, right before they hit the back button and click your competitor.

  A beautiful website that loads slowly is still a slow website.

That's the uncomfortable truth I get into on this week's episode. Google ranks slow sites lower and real people leave them. And here's the part almost nobody tells you: most sites aren't slow because the engine is weak. They're slow because the trunk is full of bricks. So let's unload them, heaviest first.

The three heaviest bricks, in order
01 IMAGES. The #1 culprit, every time. Someone uploaded a 6,000-pixel photo to a spot that shows it at 1,200. Resize it (nothing wider than about 1920px), compress it, and turn on lazy loading. This one fix solves the speed problem on more than half the sites I open.
02 PLUGINS. If you're on WordPress, go count them. Thirty? Forty? Every plugin is a passenger loading its own code. If it doesn't have a real job, it comes off. Two plugins doing the same thing is one too many.
03 THE BUILD. A bloated all-in-one theme ships 100% of its code while you use about 10%. Clean, purpose-built code wins every time.
The fastest code is the code that isn't there.

And please, stop chasing a perfect 100 on your PageSpeed score. Squeezing out those last few points usually costs more than it earns. You don't need perfect. You need fast enough for a real customer on a real phone. Good beats perfect.

 
 
⚙️ SEO term of the week
Core Web Vitals
By the book

Google's set of real-user experience metrics measuring how fast a page loads its main content, how quickly it responds to interaction, and how much it shifts around while loading. Google uses them as a ranking signal.

In plain English

Core Web Vitals are the dyno test for your website: not how pretty it looks parked, but how it actually performs under load with a real driver. If your vitals look like a lawnmower engine pretending to be a race car, Google notices, and so does every customer on a phone in a parking lot. The full plain-English tour is in this week's episode.

What each one feels like to a visitor
→ Loading: the biggest thing on the page takes forever to show up, so the page feels broken
→ Interactivity: they tap a button and nothing happens for a beat, so they tap it again, twice
→ Stability: the page jumps right as they tap, and they hit the ad instead of the menu
🔑 The single most revealing question of all
“What's the heaviest thing on our homepage, and why is it still there?”
Ask your web team, or ask yourself. Speed work is mostly subtraction, and a team that knows your site can name the heaviest passenger immediately. If nobody can answer, nobody's been looking. Speed is horsepower. Bloat is bricks.
 

Your wrench for the week

I put the whole thing on one page: the Website Speed Pit-Stop Checklist. It's the exact list I run when I audit a site, in the order I run it.

🏁 Get the Speed Pit-Stop Checklist →
🎧 Core Web Vitals, on Ready For Traction →
 
→ Ran the homework and the score stung?

Reply with your mobile PageSpeed score and your site. I'll tell you which brick to pull out first and whether it's an afternoon fix or a real project. Straight read, no pitch.
  You don't need perfect. You need fast enough. Good beats perfect.

Take the bricks out of the trunk,

Amber
Active Media  |  SEO Sidekick  |  Ready For Traction

 

P.S. Your homework: run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights, look at the MOBILE score, and fix whatever it lists first. I already know it's going to say images.

Imagine an AI assistant that monitors 70+ crypto markets every 5 minutes, identifies high-momentum setups, enters positions automatically, manages layered take-profits, and sends you Telegram alerts for every action.

Hey, I'm Amber

Let's take control of your growth strategy by learning simple SEO tips each week in my newsletter!

Hey I'm Amber, a seasoned SEO coach specializing in helping marketing professionals learn SEO with ease. With a keen focus on strategy and foundational SEO, I bring a technical approach to the table. My expertise lies in communicating the three foundations of SEO to help you better craft an SEO strategy that will drive impactful results.

Read more from Hey, I'm Amber
The SEO Sidekick teaches reader how to not build a conversion graveyard.

This week's teardown · The conversion graveyard The ads worked. The page was a graveyard. Hey Reader, Quick ghost story for the last week of spooky season, and this one is real. I looked at a campaign this month that had everything going for it. Thousands of clicks. About four percent of those people made it to the landing page and watched the video. And then zero of them booked an appointment. Not one. The ads worked. The page was a graveyard. And this is the trap almost everyone falls into:...

about 15 hours ago • 2 min read
SEo Sidekick teaches up how to Show up in the AI Overviews via social media

This week's teardown · Get quoted by the machine The machine is answering. It just picked someone else's name. Hey Reader, Quick spooky-season truth to start your week. Right now, someone is asking Google or ChatGPT a question your business is the perfect answer to. And the machine is answering them. It just picked someone else's name to say. That's the AI Overview, the answer box now sitting at the top of search, and it's changing the game. Search used to be ten blue links and a click. More...

7 days ago • 3 min read
seo sidekick share info on how

This week's teardown · Don't go dark Going dark for the season will haunt you in spring. Hey Reader, Since it's still October, one more spooky story. A seasonal business wraps up its last booking of the year, and then goes fully dark. Ads off. Blog silent. Website untouched for months. Come spring, they flip the lights back on and find a graveyard where their traffic used to be, while a competitor who stayed warm all winter is booked through June. Assuming Google will hold your spot while you...

15 days ago • 3 min read