Why your site crawls on hotel wifi, and the four fixes that work
Latency ruins a page long before bandwidth does. Ship these four changes and most sites feel instant again by the next deploy.
Hotel wifi is not slow in the way people mean when they say slow. The pipe is usually fine. What is terrible is the round trip, and a page that needs eleven of them before it can render text will feel broken no matter how small the files are.
Count the round trips, not the kilobytes
Open the network panel, sort by start time, and count how many requests happen before the first paint. That number, multiplied by your worst-case latency, is your floor.
- Preconnect to the two origins you genuinely cannot avoid, and no more.
- Inline the critical CSS, or at least stop importing stylesheets from stylesheets.
- Serve fonts from your own origin so they reuse the connection you already paid for.
- Set a cache header that lets a repeat visit skip the whole conversation.
Test on a plane, not a train
Throttling to “Slow 3G” simulates bandwidth, not latency. Add 300 ms of round-trip delay in the throttling profile and the results change completely.
None of these four is a rewrite. All four fit in one afternoon, and the ordering matters less than doing them at all.