We Tested 46 Ugandan Websites on a Phone. Only 2 Scored Well.

I keep telling people that Ugandan customers meet your website on a phone. So on 31 October 2026 we stopped guessing and tested it. Then we ran the whole test again the next day, to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.

We took 48 websites from well-known Ugandan organisations: hotels, universities, hospitals, financial institutions, companies and NGOs. Then we ran each homepage through Google’s mobile speed test and our own health check.

These aren’t tiny businesses with a site someone’s nephew built. Many are big, respected names with real budgets. That’s why the result surprised me.

Google gave us a usable score for 46 of them. Two reached the good band of 90 or above. Fifteen landed in the poor band below 50. The median score was 55.

I’m not naming any site, because this isn’t about embarrassing anyone. But you shouldn’t have to take my word for it, so every result is further down this page, with the names removed. Two days before this test, our own homepage scored 79, so I’m not throwing stones.

Thirteen seconds is a long time to stare at a screen

The number that matters most to a visitor is how long it takes for the main content to appear. Google calls a page good at 2.5 seconds or less.

In a simulated test on a mid-range phone with a slower connection, the median site took 13.2 seconds. Only 4 sites of 46 met the 2.5-second mark. Thirty-four took more than 10 seconds, and 3 took more than 30.

Try counting to 13 slowly, with your finger hovering over the back button. Real phones and networks will vary, and a test is not a stopwatch in somebody’s hand. Even so, that gap is hard to explain away.

The homepage that weighs 54MB

Next we looked at how much data each homepage loads. The median was 5.9MB. Twelve sites were over 10MB, and the heaviest was 54.6MB, for one page. Just one site came in under 1MB.

At MTN’s Shs10,000 for 4GB bundle, that median homepage costs a visitor about Shs15, and the heaviest about Shs130. Sounds like small change, until you remember it’s one page, it happens before they’ve decided they’re interested, and for someone down to their last 50MB, that heaviest page simply won’t open.

In nearly every case I’d expect the cause to be ordinary: photographs uploaded straight from a camera, sliders full of huge images, video, and plugins nobody remembers installing.

How the sectors compared

Each group here is small, so read this as a hint, not a league table. These are median scores and times.

• Hotels: score 85, main content in 4.1 seconds (7 sites)
• Hospitals and health: score 59, in 11.4 seconds (8 sites)
• Companies: score 57, in 15.7 seconds (7 sites)
• NGOs: score 55, in 12.9 seconds (7 sites)
• Banks and finance: score 55, in 12.8 seconds (7 sites)
• Universities: score 50.5, in 17.7 seconds (10 sites)

Hotels did best by a distance. I can’t prove why, but I have a guess: a hotel’s website has to win bookings, so somebody is paying attention to it. Universities came last, and their sites tend to carry the most: news, departments, notices and years of uploads. Yet thousands of students, many on tight data budgets, depend on those pages.

Reaching them is harder than it should be

Speed is only half of it. We also looked for basic ways to reach someone, in the code of the 42 homepages we could read.

• Only 16 of 42 had a tap-to-call phone link. On a phone, that’s the easiest button there is.
• 23 of 42 mentioned WhatsApp somewhere on the page.
• 23 of 42 mentioned privacy at all. Yet 28 had a form on the page.

Our check reads the page as delivered, so a link hidden in a script could be missed. Treat those as minimums. But if more than half of these homepages make a phone user copy a number by hand, that’s a lot of lost calls.

Google is being left guessing

Our health check found 16 of 43 sites with no meta description at all, the short summary under your link in search results. Fifteen had no main H1 heading. Those are small fixes that take minutes, and they help Google and customers understand a page.

Now the good news

All 43 sites our check could read loaded securely over HTTPS. A few years ago that would have been a surprise. And 41 of 43 were set up to fit a phone screen. So the basic job of working on mobile is largely done.

That’s why this result is good news for you. The sites aren’t broken, they’re heavy. Heavy can be fixed, usually without a redesign.

What I’d do this week

1. Weigh your homepage. Run our free health check. You’ll get Google’s mobile score and plain fixes in under a minute. Compare it to the median of 55. Or run the same test we used on Google PageSpeed Insights.
2. Fix your images first. It’s the biggest win on most sites. Nothing on a phone screen needs a 5MB photo.
3. Lose the homepage video and slider, unless you can show they earn their weight.
4. Make your phone number tappable, and add a WhatsApp link.
5. Write a meta description for your homepage. Two honest sentences will do.

Those fixes aren’t glamorous. Few people will ever compliment you on a smaller homepage. But in a market where the median site takes 13 seconds, a fast one stands out, and customers notice without knowing why.

Want us to do it for you? Keeping sites light is part of Website Care, and it starts with a free review. Or message us on WhatsApp on +256 757 343 911.

Every result, without the names

This is the full list of 46 from the 1 November run, best to worst. The letters only follow the ranking, so Hotel A is simply the highest-scoring hotel. Scores are out of 100, main content is the time until it appeared in the simulated phone test, and homepage is the data it loaded.

Here are two of Google’s own reports, with the website details taken out. We fetched these for this article just after the main run, so a report can differ slightly from the table.

How we did this

We wanted you to be able to judge this for yourself, so here’s the method and its limits.

• The sites: we hand-picked 50 live websites of well-known organisations across six sectors. It’s not a random sample, and it says little about small businesses. We removed 2 sites that mention KasiryeLabs, to keep the results independent, leaving 48. Between the two runs, one of those 48 was hacked and began showing a spam page, so we removed it from the results. Google returned no result for another, which leaves 46.
• The speed test: Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile setting, run on each homepage on 31 October 2026 and again on 1 November, using a simulated mid-range phone and slower connection. Scores move between runs and from day to day, so individual sites shifted, but the headline numbers held: 2 sites in the good band both times, a median score of 55, 13.2 seconds to the main content and a 5.9MB homepage. Every figure in this article comes from the 1 November run, the only one where we kept the record for each site.
• The health check: our own 17-point tool. Four sites blocked it or didn’t respond, leaving 43.
• The contact checks: a simple scan of homepage code for 42 sites that returned it to us.
• Only homepages: an inner page may be better or worse.
• Data cost: worked out from the MTN monthly bundle of Shs10,000 for 4GB, as reported in August 2026.