Client (140/Mbps) Internet speed claiming slow page load across devices

Good evening Webflowers. I don’t this to be just another ‘slow site pls help’ thread, but I’ve already implemented all of the SEO strategies and optimization techniques that I know of, yet one of my clients still is experiencing site issues. I suspected that she was simply using a slow internet connection, but she sent me a screenshot of her speedtest results and claims that the issue persists on all of her devices, including desktop and mobile, as well as in different locations.

I haven’t had others I’ve shared the site with tell me anything similar to my client. At most, some of the pages take 5-8 seconds to load depending on your internet connection.

My website is https://www.sonder.video. I’ve compressed all of the images on my site, am only using a handful of javascript snippits, and everything is very SEO friendly and optimized. The site loads very quickly on my end (internet: avg.400mbps). I loaded the page on cellular, on incognito tabs, and on an ipad and have had no issues.

I just ran a lighthouse audit and received what I could consider to be a very high score, relative to other sites I’ve seen in the past.

Next, I used the Chrome developer tools to throttle my connection. On a fast 3G connection, the site takes about 5-10 seconds to load. On a slow 3G connection, the site really crawls… not sure if my page transitions might be causing some kind of issues?

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I did everything in my power to create a lightweight site that was SEO friendly… so it’s very frustrating to hear a client experiencing issues with my site! Thanks everyone.


Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

Tip - ditch Google Maps, convert Youtube videos into lightboxes and don’t load 500k gifs.

Thanks for the response, sorry I’m just getting around to seeing this.

So the only current integration with Google Maps is a form field autofill on my contact form. Do you think that would be causing a significant impact on my site performance?

Also I just recently added a YouTube video on my homepage for one of the items to replace an HTML video block that uses PLYR.js. Originally I liked the customization options from Plyr but it seems to have some issues with playback… I’m currently hosting media files on an Amazon S3 bucket with public access and grabbing the media URL to use in the video player. This is the one department I’m really unsure about since I need a stable solution for multiple videos on a page. Also not sure I completely follow your solution on lightboxes. Are you suggesting the video thumbnails are replaced with lightboxes, which would open a new modal upon click, therefore only loading the videos after they’re interacted with? Would this change where I’d need to pull the videos from? Any recommendations on handling multiple video files is appreciated!

Finally on gifs - my home page only has 1 gif, which is an animated profile picture on the about section. The physical about page is the most gif-heavy page of the website (about 15 gifs, polaroid images are static images and change to animated stories upon hover), but would this page affect all of my other pages?

Thanks for chiming in @webdev!