Building fast websites for Caribbean mobile networks

The conditions your site actually loads in

Regional traffic splits into two very different populations. On-island visitors arrive on phones over mobile data that varies with weather, cruise-ship arrivals and time of day. Off-island visitors — the ones researching a villa, a charter or a professional service before travelling — arrive on good connections but with no patience and several competing tabs open.

Both punish weight. A homepage carrying six uncompressed hero photographs and a stack of third-party scripts can take ten seconds to become useful on a mid-range Android over a busy cell. Most visitors do not wait, and the ones who do arrive irritated.

What to measure

Three numbers cover almost everything that matters commercially. Measure them on a throttled mobile profile, not on your office laptop.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — target under 2.5 seconds. This is when the page looks loaded.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — target under 200 milliseconds. This is whether taps feel instant.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — target under 0.1. This is whether content jumps while loading.
• Total transferred bytes on first view — aim well under 1.5 MB for a content page.

The techniques that move the numbers

Images dominate almost every slow Caribbean site, because the region sells on photography. The answer is not fewer pictures; it is disciplined delivery.

• Serve modern formats (AVIF or WebP) at multiple widths and let the browser pick with srcset.
• Always set explicit width and height so the layout never shifts.
• Lazy-load everything below the fold; preload only the hero image.
• Render HTML on the server or at build time so content is readable before JavaScript runs — this also helps AI crawlers that do not execute scripts.
• Ship less JavaScript: audit third-party tags and remove anything without a measurable job.
• Serve from an edge network so assets come from a nearby location rather than a single distant origin.
• Self-host fonts, subset them, and avoid render-blocking external stylesheets.
• Compress and cache aggressively, with long cache lifetimes on fingerprinted assets.

Speed as a business metric

Treat performance as a booking and enquiry metric rather than a technical vanity score. In our experience the shape is consistent: cutting a Caribbean hospitality homepage from eight seconds to under three reliably increases the proportion of visitors who reach a booking or contact page, and reduces bounce most sharply among off-island mobile traffic — precisely the audience with the highest value.

Performance also decays. Every new gallery, tracking pixel and embedded widget adds weight, which is why we include speed budgets and monthly checks in our website management programmes rather than treating a launch-day score as permanent.