Users say the site is slow but Lighthouse says 95

Solved · 395 views · asked 3 weeks ago by amara_v · edited

Lighthouse is green. Real users in Lagos and Nairobi say every click takes seconds.

What I’ve tried

Compressed images, added caching headers.

Where is the server? If the database is in us-east and your users are in Lagos, every query is a transatlantic round trip. deploydan 3 weeks ago · edited

Supabase in us-east-1, Replit I think also US. amara_v 3 weeks ago · edited

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lena_ops3 weeks ago · edited

Lighthouse runs from a US data center against your US server. Your users are 10,000 km away and every API call pays that distance, several times per page.

Check: open DevTools → Network with throttling set to "Slow 4G" and watch how many sequential requests one click makes. Then:

Put the static site on a CDN (Vercel/Netlify do this by default).
Batch API calls: one request per page, not one per widget.
If your users are in one region, host the database near them.

Lighthouse measures your server. Your users measure the distance.

Comment

Slow 4G throttling showed it exactly. Moving the database region is a big job, so first I cut the page from 9 requests to 2. amara_v 3 weeks ago · edited

Right order. Fewer round trips helps everywhere; the region move can wait. lena_ops 3 weeks ago · edited

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Users say the site is slow but Lighthouse says 95

What I’ve tried

1 answer

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