Performance
Why your website is slow, and what it's costing you
Speed is the rare technical problem with a directly visible commercial cost: people leave. It's also one of the few things you can measure precisely, fix definitively, and see the result of. Most slow sites are slow for three or four reasons, and the same ones come up again and again.
Rather just ask someone? Talk to usIn short
Most slow sites are slow for the same handful of reasons: oversized images, too many third-party scripts, render-blocking fonts and CSS, and cheap shared hosting far from your visitors. Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds are 2.5 seconds for LCP, 200 milliseconds for INP and 0.1 for CLS. Images are almost always the first and biggest win.
- What are Core Web Vitals?
- Three measurements Google uses to describe how a page feels to a real visitor. Largest Contentful Paint is how long until the main content appears — good is 2.5 seconds or less. Interaction to Next Paint is how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks — good is 200 milliseconds or less; it replaced First Input Delay in 2024. Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much the page jumps around while loading — good is 0.1 or less. They're measured on real visits, so your phone on office wi-fi is not the test.
The thresholds
Google's published 'good' bands, assessed at the 75th percentile of real visits. Anything worse than the third column needs work.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) ≤ 2.5s
- Time until the main content is visible. Needs improvement to 4.0s, poor beyond that. Usually an image or font problem.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) ≤ 200ms
- Responsiveness to taps and clicks. Needs improvement to 500ms, poor beyond. Usually too much JavaScript.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) ≤ 0.1
- Visual stability while loading. Needs improvement to 0.25, poor beyond. Usually images or ads without reserved space.
What actually works
Images, almost every time
A photo straight off a phone is four megabytes and eight times larger than any screen needs. Resize to the display size, serve WebP or AVIF, set width and height so nothing jumps, and lazy-load anything below the fold. This alone fixes a large share of slow sites.
Count your third-party scripts
Analytics, chat widget, heatmaps, two pixels, a review widget, a font service, a cookie banner. Each one is a separate connection to a server you don't control. Open the network tab and remove anything nobody has looked at in six months.
Fonts block the text from appearing
Custom fonts delay rendering while they download. Self-host them, preload the one or two weights you actually use, and set font-display so text shows immediately in a fallback. Four weights of two families is three weights too many.
Hosting matters more than people expect
Cheap shared hosting on the other side of the world adds hundreds of milliseconds before your site sends a single byte. A CDN and hosting with an Australian edge is often the cheapest meaningful improvement available.
Plugins accumulate
On WordPress especially, every plugin adds queries, CSS and JavaScript to every page — including the ones that only run on the contact form. Audit what's installed and delete rather than deactivate.
Test what visitors experience, not what you do
Use PageSpeed Insights for field data from real visits, and test on a mid-range Android phone on mobile data. Your desktop on office wi-fi is the most flattering possible measurement and the least useful one.
Fix the largest thing first
Performance work has a long tail of diminishing returns. One 4MB hero image usually outweighs every micro-optimisation combined. Find the biggest item in the waterfall and deal with it before anything clever.
When this isn't your problem
If your site loads in two seconds and enquiries are flat, speed is not your problem and shaving another 300 milliseconds won't change anything — look at what the page says and where the call to action is. Chase performance when the site is genuinely slow on a phone, or when Search Console is telling you your Core Web Vitals are failing.
Want us to look at it?
Send us your site and what you're trying to improve. We'll tell you what we'd do first — including when the honest answer is that you don't need us.
Common questions
Aim for the main content appearing within 2.5 seconds on a mid-range phone on mobile data, taps responding within 200 milliseconds, and no visible layout jumping. Those are Google's 'good' thresholds and they're a reasonable bar for any business site.
Yes, but modestly — Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal, not a dominant one. The larger effect is commercial: slow pages lose visitors before they read anything, so the conversion cost usually exceeds the ranking cost.
Mobile scores simulate a mid-range phone on a slower connection, which is much closer to reality for most visitors. Desktop scores flatter you. If the two disagree, believe the mobile one.
A focused pass — images, fonts, scripts, caching — is typically a few hundred to two thousand dollars depending on the platform, and usually produces most of the available gain. If the site is slow because of how it's built, that's a rebuild conversation and we'll say so.
Also worth a look
- Your Website Gets Traffic But No Enquiries
- How to Rank Locally in Your Own Town
- How to Redesign Without Losing Your Google Rankings
- Weighing up who should build it, and what it should cost?
Last reviewed . Figures are indicative Australian ranges, not quotes.