Somebody has probably rung you about this. They told you your website scored 34 out of 100, or that it takes seven seconds to load, or that it is failing Google's tests. Then they offered to build you a new one.
Some of what they said was true. The conclusion almost certainly was not.
Here is what actually makes a website slow, in plain English, and how to work out what you are looking at before you spend anything.
It is almost never the platform
The first thing you get told is that you are on the wrong system. Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, or whatever your nephew built it in.
Google measures the speed of millions of real websites, using real visits from real phones. On that measurement, Wix sites pass about four times in five. Squarespace passes about seven times in ten. Sites built on WordPress — which is what most agencies use, including most of the people who ring you — pass about half the time.
So the platform you are being told to leave is very likely faster than the one you are being sold.
That is not because Wix is clever and WordPress is rubbish. It is because Wix controls everything: one way of doing photos, one set of hosting, and no way for you to install something that wrecks it. A site built by an agency can be anything, including excellent and including terrible.
Which means the interesting question is not what your site was built in. It is what has been put on it since.
What is actually slowing it down
Four things, in the order we usually find them.
Photos. This is the big one, and it is almost always the answer on a site the owner built themselves. A photo taken on your phone is enormous — often four or five megabytes. Put six of them on your home page and a customer on mobile data is downloading the equivalent of a short film to look at your team. Resized properly, the same photos look identical and load in a fraction of the time.
Apps, add-ons and widgets. The booking tool, the review carousel, the live chat, the two different tracking codes, the social media feed, the pop-up offering ten per cent off. Each one is a separate connection your website has to wait for, and each one was added for a good reason on a different day. Nobody ever goes back and counts them.
Video on the home page. A background video behind your heading looks expensive and costs you real customers on a phone in a driveway. If you have one, it is probably in your top three problems.
The hosting. This is the invisible one. Hosting is the computer your website lives on, and on the cheapest plans that computer is shared with hundreds of other websites. It can sit there for a full second doing nothing before it even starts sending your page. Nothing you do to the website itself fixes that second.
Notice what is not on that list: the platform, the person who built it, and the year it was made.
Does being slow actually hurt you on Google?
Less than you have been told. This is the part worth reading twice, because it is where the money usually gets wasted.
Google has published its position and it is fairly plain. It shows the most useful page first, even when that page is slower than the alternatives. Speed only really tips the balance between pages that are already about as useful as each other.
Think of it as the tiebreaker rather than the game. If two plumbers have equally good pages about hot water systems in Toowong, the faster one may well win. If your page does not really talk about hot water systems at all, making it load in half a second does not put you anywhere near that competition.
So if your website is slow and you are not being found on Google, the slowness is very unlikely to be why you are not being found. Not being found is almost always because the site does not say the things people are typing in. That is a different problem with a different fix — the pages and groundwork that get a site found (SEO) — and it is worth knowing which one you have before anybody invoices you.
There is still a good reason to care about speed. It is just not the one you were given. People leave. Somebody standing in their kitchen deciding who to call does not wait seven seconds — they go back and tap the next result. You never hear about it, there is no missed call and no email, and that is exactly what makes it easy to ignore.
How to check it yourself in five minutes
You do not need anyone for this part.
- Open your own website on your phone with wifi switched off. Use mobile data, the way a customer would. Start from a Google search rather than a page you already have open. Count how long until you can read something. Past three or four seconds, you have something worth looking at.
- Do the same on your busiest page — the one for your main service, not just the home page. It is often worse, because that is where the photos are.
- Put your web address into Google PageSpeed Insights. It is free and you do not need an account. Read the coloured section at the top, which is what real visitors actually got. Ignore the score out of 100 below it — that is a simulation on a pretend phone and it changes every time you press the button. The person who rang you quoted you that number because it is the scariest one on the page.
- Count your apps and add-ons, then count how many you would actually miss.
Most of the time this produces a short, specific list. Big photos, four add-ons nobody uses, and slow hosting. None of that needs a new website.
When a new website genuinely is the answer
Sometimes it is, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise.
- The site was built by dragging blocks around, and every page is held together by that, so changing anything properly means building it again anyway
- Whoever built it has gone and nobody can safely touch it
- You need it to do something it simply cannot do — take bookings, take payments, handle enquiries properly
- You want to be found on Google properly, and named by AI assistants, and the platform will not let you go past a certain point
- The site no longer describes the business you run. Services you have stopped offering. Work you no longer want. A business that has grown up and a website that has not.
The search one deserves a word, because at first glance it contradicts everything above. Speed is almost never about the platform. Being read properly partly is.
Google and assistants like ChatGPT do not read your website the way a customer does. They are looking for plain facts, written in a form built for machines — what the business is, where it works, what it does, what it costs, the questions it answers. Every website publishes some of that automatically. On a template platform you get whatever the template decided to publish, and usually no way to change it or add to it. Shopify will not let you choose your own page addresses. Most builders will not let you change what your site tells an AI crawler about itself. Plenty of businesses rank perfectly well on Wix, so this is not a reason to panic — but there is a ceiling, and you tend to find out where it is only after you have hit it.
On a site built for you, none of that is fixed. The facts can be stated the way machines read them, the questions and answers can be published in a form an assistant can lift and quote, and the addresses can match what people actually type. That is ordinary work rather than magic, and nobody can honestly promise you a position on Google for it. It is simply the difference between doing the usual version and being able to do all of it — and it matters more every year, because a growing number of your customers never see a results page at all. They ask an assistant and act on what it says.
The last one on the list is the common case, and the one nobody rings you about, because it does not show up in any tool. It is also the one most worth spending real money on.
None of those is a speed problem. They are all the same question wearing different clothes: is the website you have the one your business needs for the next five years? That is what a new website is for. A score out of 100 is not.
And the $99 a month question
Website plans in Australia commonly run $99 to $399 a month with nothing to pay upfront, and they are usually quick. Everything above explains why. One template, their hosting, their way of handling photos, and no way for you to add anything that breaks it.
The speed is genuine. What you are buying alongside it is a website you do not own. The limits do not appear in month one — they appear the first time you want a page that does not fit the template, or a booking form that works the way your business actually works, and the answer is that it cannot be done rather than what it would cost. If you leave, the website does not come with you.
Ours works differently and it is worth saying plainly what that buys. A Starter site is from $250 a month, plus a build quoted to the job. The site is built rather than assembled, so there is no pile of add-ons quietly loading on pages that do not use them. The hosting is ours, so a slow server is our problem to fix rather than yours to live with. When something needs changing you send it to us — an email or a text with the photos — and it normally goes up by the next business day, so there is no system for you to learn and no password to lose. And it is yours. Your content and your domain stay yours, and we hand them over if you ever want them.
That is the level for a business that wants a site which works properly and stays looked after. The search and AI visibility described further up is the next one — Growth, from $750 a month plus a build quoted to the job, because that tier contains someone actually doing the work each month rather than just keeping the site running. Worth knowing which of the two you are reading about, because they are different purchases.
Speed, in that arrangement, is not something anybody sold you. It is just what happens when nothing unnecessary was put on the page.