Speed Is Part of the Welcome: What I Changed to Make My Hub Load Faster

After fifty years in aviation, I learned something that transfers to almost everything: the moment the door closes and the plane pushes back on time, passengers relax. They trust you before the wheels even leave the ground. An on-time departure is not just logistics — it is a form of hospitality.

A slow-loading page is the opposite of that. It is the equivalent of a delayed gate with no announcement, no screen updates, and no agent at the counter. Some people leave before boarding.

When I started building HUBOnlineSolutions.com — step by step, starting from zero, the same way the people I serve are starting — I paid almost no attention to speed. I was focused on getting the pages to look right and say the right things. That was fine for a while. Then I actually measured.

What the Numbers Said

I ran my hub's homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting. The score came back as 66. That sits in the range they flag as needing improvement. More telling were the timing numbers:

• The first piece of content appeared on screen after 4.3 seconds.
• The main content finished loading after 6.1 seconds.
• The page was shifting around visually while it loaded — buttons and text moving after you already tried to read them.

Six seconds on a mobile phone feels like a very long wait. I would not ask a passenger to stand at the jetway for six seconds with no information. I should not ask a visitor to wait either.

What I Changed, in Plain Words

I am not a developer. I worked through the suggestions that PageSpeed Insights listed, one at a time, with help. Here is what I actually changed:

1. I measured first instead of guessing

This sounds obvious, but I had been assuming the page was fine because it looked fine to me on my laptop. PageSpeed Insights tests the mobile version, which is how most of the people you serve will find your hub. That alone changed how I saw the problem.

2. The top of the page shows right away

I had an animation playing at the very top of the page — the kind that fades in slowly. It looked nice. But it also meant the page was waiting to show anything until that animation was ready. I removed it from the top section. The headline and the call to action now appear immediately. Animations can live lower on the page, where they do not delay the first impression.

3. Pages people have not visited yet load only when they visit them

My hub has several pages — the homepage, a resources page, a contact page. Before, the browser was trying to pre-load parts of all of them, even when someone just arrived at the homepage. I adjusted settings so that each page loads its own content when someone actually visits it. Less wasted work upfront.

4. Fonts load earlier and only where they are used

I was using a couple of custom fonts across the hub. The problem was that every page loaded every font file, even fonts used on only a few pages. Now the main font loads earlier, and the extra fonts load only on the pages that use them. Text now appears faster, and nothing jumps when the font finally arrives.

5. I removed a tracking tag I no longer needed

I had a tag manager script on the site that I no longer needed, because I am not running ads. It was still loading every time someone visited the page, adding a small delay each time. I removed it. If you are not actively using a tool, take it off your pages. Every script that runs is time the visitor spends waiting.

Why This Belongs in the Category of Welcome

The people who find your hub — whoever they are, whatever brought them there — arrive with a small window of attention and trust. That window starts shrinking the moment the page does not respond. Speed is not a technical detail you handle after everything else is done. It is part of the first impression. It is part of your welcome.

In aviation, we did not separate the on-time departure from the service. They were the same thing. When your hub loads fast, under your brand, the people you serve feel it — even if they cannot name what they are feeling. They feel respected. And they have a better chance of staying to read what you wrote.

A slow page is not just a technical problem. It is a hospitality problem. And hospitality is something every one of us can fix.

— Raul E. Toro

Try This Today

You do not need to fix everything at once. Here is one small thing you can do right now:

1. Go to pagespeed.web.dev.
2. Paste in the address of your hub's homepage.
3. Click the Mobile tab when results appear.
4. Read the list of suggestions. Pick one — just one — and look into it.

Speed is not about impressing anyone with technology. It is about keeping a promise you made when you decided to build a hub — that the people you serve can find what they need, in one place, without unnecessary friction. A fast-loading page is a quiet way of saying: I was ready for you.

If you are building your hub step by step and want to follow along as I do the same, this is the place. No shortcuts, no hype — just the real steps, shared openly.