Your website looks great on your office computer. But your customers are not on your office computer. They are on a phone, with very little data.
Zimbabwe has two internets
In the second quarter of 2025, POTRAZ counted 252,407 fixed internet connections. Those are home and office lines. People on them used about 490GB a month.
But 11.3 million people were on mobile data. They used about 3.8GB a month. That is the gap.
The person searching for a plumber, a school or a lawyer is almost surely on that small plan. Every megabyte your site loads comes out of it.
What a heavy page costs them
Page weight is the total size of your page. Text, photos and code, added up. A heavy page can be 6MB. A lean one can be under 1MB and still look great.
A 6MB page on a 3.8GB plan uses about 0.16% of their month. All to check your opening hours. Add ten big photos and they will leave and click your competitor.
Three free checks for this week
You do not need to be technical. Do these in order:
- Test your page. Go to Google PageSpeed Insights, paste your web address and run it. Aim for a page under 2MB that loads in under 3 seconds on a phone.
- Shrink your photos. TinyPNG or Squoosh can turn a 4MB photo into 200KB. It looks almost the same.
- Fix your page title. Say what you do and where, like "Affordable Plumbing in Harare". Not just "Home".
Build for the phone first. The fibre users will be fine too.
Do not forget your Google listing
Claim your free Google Business Profile. It puts you on Google Maps with your hours, phone number and reviews. For many local shops, it brings in more customers than the website does.
If your site is slow on a phone, Eka builds fast, light websites made for exactly this Zimbabwean reality.
