profile

Hey, I'm Amber

Cycle 19: bricks in the trunk

Published 22 days 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 is cleaning up dead content from a website

This week's teardown · The undead edition There are zombies shuffling around your website. Hey Reader, It's October, so let's talk about the undead. Specifically, the ones living on your website right now. I call it zombie content. Old blog posts and forgotten pages that get no traffic, rank for nothing, and convert nobody. They're not dead, because Google still has them indexed. They're not alive, because they earn you nothing. They just shuffle along. And they are not harmless: What the...

about 24 hours ago • 3 min read
SEo Sidekick works on the fastest car in the garage

This week's teardown · Claim your lane The map pack is the podium. Three spots, no page one. Hey Reader, Quick one this week, because it's the highest-return hour in local marketing and almost nobody spends it. When someone searches “near me,” Google doesn't lead with ten links. It leads with a map and three businesses. That's the podium. If you're not one of the three, your website never even gets a shot at the click. The good news: getting into that map pack doesn't take a six-month content...

8 days ago • 2 min read
the seo sidekick explains why having multiple websites is slowing down your authority

This week's teardown · One mothership You're splitting your horsepower five ways. Hey Reader, Quick gut check. How many websites does your business actually own? Not how many do you use. How many exist. The main site, sure. But also the course site. The landing page for that webinar. The microsite from the launch two years ago. The blog someone parked on a subdomain. Go count them. I'll wait. The 90-second sprawl count 01 List every domain and subdomain your business owns. Check your...

15 days ago • 3 min read