A one-second delay can cut conversions noticeably. Here's why website speed matters for Australian businesses and the practical steps to fix a slow site.
Speed is invisible when it's good and brutal when it's bad. Australian shoppers on mobile data have zero patience for a site that takes five seconds to load — they hit back and go to a competitor. Worse, Google uses speed as a ranking factor, so a slow site loses customers twice: once at the click and once in the rankings.
What slow speed actually costs you
- Conversions drop measurably with every extra second of load time
- Bounce rates climb as impatient visitors leave before the page renders
- Google ranks you lower, reducing the traffic you get in the first place
- Mobile users — the majority in Australia — suffer the most on slower connections
Understanding Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are Google's specific measures of user experience. There are three to know:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how fast the main content loads — aim for under 2.5 seconds
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when tapped — aim for under 200ms
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around as it loads — keep it minimal
You can check your own scores for free using Google PageSpeed Insights — just enter your URL.
Common causes of slow websites
- Huge, uncompressed images (the single most common culprit)
- Too many plugins or third-party scripts, especially on WordPress
- Cheap, overloaded shared hosting
- No caching or content delivery network (CDN)
- Bloated page builders that load far more code than needed
How to make your site fast
- 1Compress and correctly size all images, and use modern formats like WebP.
- 2Use a CDN so content is served from a location close to each visitor.
- 3Enable caching so returning visitors don't re-download everything.
- 4Remove unnecessary plugins and scripts you don't truly need.
- 5Choose quality hosting, or better, a modern framework that's fast by default.
We build websites with Next.js, which is engineered for speed — images optimise automatically, code splits intelligently, and pages can be served as static files from a global CDN. The result is sites that routinely score in the green on Core Web Vitals. If your current site is dragging, we can audit it and tell you exactly what's slowing it down.
Frequently asked questions
How fast should my website load?
Aim for a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds and a total load time under 3 seconds on a mobile connection. Beyond that, bounce rates climb sharply and conversions fall. You can check your scores free with Google PageSpeed Insights.
What is the most common cause of a slow website?
Large, uncompressed images are by far the most common cause of slow websites, followed by too many plugins or third-party scripts, cheap overloaded hosting, and the absence of caching or a CDN.