Skip to content

A slow site is
costing you enquiries.

Somebody on a phone, on mobile data, halfway through comparing three tradies. If your page is still blank when theirs has loaded, you are not in the comparison any more. We measure what is actually slow on your site — for free — and then quote the fix, rather than selling you a package before anybody has looked.

The three numbers Google measures

Core Web Vitals are three specific measurements taken from real visitors to your site, not from a lab. Each has a published threshold, which is why speed work can be argued about concretely rather than by feel.

LCP — Largest contentful paint

Target: Under 2.5 seconds

How long until the main thing on the page — usually your hero image or headline — is actually visible. This is the one people mean when they say a site is slow.

INP — Interaction to next paint

Target: Under 200 milliseconds

How long the page takes to respond when somebody taps something. A page that looks ready but ignores the first three taps fails here.

CLS — Cumulative layout shift

Target: Under 0.1

How much the page jumps around while it loads. This is what makes somebody tap the wrong button, and it is usually images with no dimensions set.

What is usually the culprit

Roughly in the order we find them. Notice that none of them are the design: slow sites are almost always the result of accumulation, not of how they look.

Images straight off the camera

A 4 MB photo scaled down by the browser still downloads as 4 MB. Resizing and converting to WebP is the single biggest win on most sites, and it changes nothing about how the page looks.

Slow or oversold hosting

If the server takes a second to answer, everything after that is already late. No amount of front-end tuning fixes it — see managed hosting, and the post on why cheap hosting costs more.

Plugin and script accumulation

Every plugin, chat widget, tracking pixel and review badge brings its own requests. Each one seemed reasonable on the day it was added. Together they are the page weight.

No compression or caching

Text compression and cache headers are free, take minutes, and are missing on a surprising number of sites. Our free check tests compression.

Render-blocking fonts and CSS

The browser waits for these before it draws anything. Self-hosting fonts and compiling the stylesheet down to only what the site uses shortens the wait — this site does both.

Images with no dimensions

The reason pages jump while loading. Setting width and height fixes cumulative layout shift and costs nothing but attention.

How this actually works

  1. 1

    Measure, free

    Run your address through the free speed test, which uses Google’s own PageSpeed test on a simulated phone and takes 15 to 30 seconds, and the free website check, which looks at server response time, page size, compression and images in about ten seconds. No email address required for either.

  2. 2

    Find the actual bottleneck

    We look at what the measurement says rather than guessing. Often it is one thing doing most of the damage, and the rest is noise. Occasionally the answer is that the site is fine and something else is losing you the enquiry.

  3. 3

    Quote the fix

    A fixed price for a defined list of changes, with the expected effect on each measurement stated. If your host is the bottleneck we say so, including when the fix is a hosting move rather than a project.

  4. 4

    Do the work and re-measure

    The same measurements, before and after, so the result is a number you can check rather than a claim you have to take on faith.

There is no published price on this page on purpose. Every other number on this site is published, and we are not going to invent a band for work whose scope genuinely cannot be known until somebody has looked at your site. What is free is the looking.

Send us the address and we will look

Three fields. Put your web address in the message and we will tell you what is slowing it down.

Or call 08 6323 2970

Speed questions

How fast does my site actually need to be?
Google’s own thresholds are a useful target rather than a rule: largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint under 200 milliseconds, and cumulative layout shift under 0.1. Our free check uses a stricter server-response target of 800 milliseconds, because everything else is downstream of how long the server takes to answer.
Will making my site faster improve my Google rankings?
A little, and honestly not as much as the industry implies. Core Web Vitals are a real but modest ranking signal, and a fast page about nothing still loses to a slow page that answers the question. Where speed pays properly is conversion: people leave slow pages, and the ones who leave were your enquiries. Treat the ranking effect as a bonus.
What actually makes a website slow?
In our experience, in this order: images uploaded at camera resolution, a cheap or overloaded shared host, too many plugins and third-party scripts each adding their own requests, no compression or caching, and fonts or scripts that block the page from rendering. Design almost never causes it. A heavy stack of well-meant additions almost always does.
Can you speed up a WordPress site?
Yes, and that is most of this work. WordPress is not inherently slow; what slows it down is accumulation — plugins nobody audits, a theme doing far more than the site needs, and images nobody resized. See our WordPress web design page, and the WordPress versus custom comparison for when the answer is a rebuild instead.
What does speed work cost?
It is quoted after we measure, not before, because until somebody looks there is no way to know whether you have one oversized hero image or a hosting problem that no amount of tuning fixes. The measurement itself is free and takes about ten seconds. If the honest answer is that your host is the bottleneck, we will say so — even where that means the fix is a $49/month hosting move rather than a project.
Is it cheaper to just rebuild the site?
Sometimes, yes, and we will tell you when. If the site is on a platform you are renting, carries a theme that cannot be slimmed down, or is old enough that it needs replacing anyway, tuning it is money spent twice. In that case read website redesign instead.

What is your site doing now?

Put your web address in the details box. We will measure it before we reply and tell you what is actually slow.

Prefer to talk? Call 08 6323 2970

How many staff in your business? *
I'm interested in...

No spam. We’ll respond within 1 business day.

Call 08 6323 2970 Quote