Your website is slow, and it is not your internet

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QUICK ANSWER

Your website is slow because it is too heavy, not because North Cyprus has bad internet. The average web page is now 2.4 megabytes and this island has almost no fibre. Part of that weight you can strip out yourself in an afternoon. The rest was decided the day your site was built, and no setting will undo it.

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Turn your phone off wifi, stand outside your own shop, and load your own website like a customer would. Count the seconds.

Almost nobody here has done that. You look at your site on a laptop, ten feet from the router, and it opens instantly. So when someone says it is slow, the obvious answer is that the internet on this island is slow.

The internet here is not the problem. The numbers are more interesting than that.

North Cyprus has almost no fibre. That part is true.

The telecoms regulator, BTHK, publishes quarterly figures. In its report for the last quarter of 2025, fibre penetration in North Cyprus was 0.05%. The OECD average, in the same report, is 7.3%.

So the island runs on a generation of infrastructure most of Europe has spent a decade replacing. That is documented by the regulator itself, and neither you nor anyone else can fix it.

The same report counts 1,176,333 registered mobile subscriptions against a population projected at roughly 489,000. Practically everyone looking at anything here is looking at it on a phone.

But the average web page has tripled to 2.4 megabytes

According to the HTTP Archive's Web Almanac, the median mobile page weight in 2025 was 2,362 kilobytes. In 2015 it was 845.

Not because pages do more. Because photographs got bigger, video backgrounds became fashionable, and every site picked up a few more scripts along the way.

Hold those two facts together. A page built to modern average weight, sent across an island with effectively no fibre, to a customer holding a phone.

That is the whole problem. It is not the connection. It is what the connection is being asked to carry.

You test on office wifi. Your customer is on the street.

Two point four megabytes is roughly nineteen megabits. On an office connection at 20 Mbps that arrives in about a second. On mobile data at 5 Mbps, closer to four seconds. On a weak signal at 2 Mbps, nine or ten.

And that is transfer time only, before your phone has drawn anything.

Google's line is 2.5 seconds. It measures how long the largest thing on your page takes to appear. Up to 2.5 seconds is good. Between 2.5 and 4 needs improvement. Over 4 is rated poor. That is Google's published standard, not an opinion.

Your customer's line is shorter. They are outside, in the sun, choosing between you and the place across the road.

Some of this you can fix yourself this week

The free version first, because for some businesses it will be enough.

Photographs straight from the camera. A modern phone photo is three to six megabytes. Four of those on a homepage and the page weighs twenty megabytes before a word is written. Resized and compressed properly, the same photograph looks identical on screen at around 150 kilobytes.

A video background. It looks impressive on the designer's monitor. On mobile data it is the most expensive thing a website can do to a visitor.

A slider. Five images load. The visitor sees one, and usually leaves before the second appears.

To find out where you stand, open PageSpeed Insights, enter your address, and read the mobile tab rather than the desktop one, which will always flatter you. Look at Largest Contentful Paint. Under 2.5 seconds is fine. Over 4 needs work now.

Do that, strip the images back, and you will genuinely claw back a second or two.

And here is where fixing it yourself stops working

Images are about a megabyte of that 2.4. Halve them perfectly and you have saved 500 kilobytes.

The other one and a half megabytes is JavaScript, the theme, the plugins and the fonts. Roughly 700 kilobytes of it is script the browser has to fetch and run before it draws anything at all.

None of that moves with a setting. There is no button. It is not a maintenance job anyone has been neglecting.

That weight is a build decision, made the day the site was created by whoever chose the theme, and it is still being paid for by every customer standing outside the shop. A template bought for forty euros loads six features nobody uses and nobody can remove, because removing them breaks the theme. A site assembled from a page builder ships the builder itself to every visitor.

The real question is whether your site was ever built for here

A site built for this island starts light. It never needs images stripped out later, because it never loaded four megabytes of them. It does not send a page builder to a phone. It clears 2.5 seconds on a weak signal, because that is the connection it was drawn against.

Nobody here is going to out-spend Google. But almost any business in Girne could load twice as fast as the shop across the road, and most of them are not even in the race.

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Find out which of the two answers is yours

Elevates is a design and engineering studio. This island is not a market we read about.

Every site we build is tested on mobile data, on a real phone, here, before it goes live. Never on the office wifi.

Call us and give us your web address. Before the call ends you will know your number, what is making it heavy, and which of these you are looking at:

An afternoon of tidying. We will tell you exactly what to change, and you can do it yourself without paying us anything.

Or it was built wrong from the start. Then we will tell you what it takes to fix, and what that costs, before you decide anything.

Both answers are free. Most people have never seen their own number.