How fast is your website, really?

Ninety or above on mobile is fast, fifty to ninety needs work, and under fifty is costing you visitors. Most small business sites we test land between twenty and forty, usually because of uncompressed images and a page builder loading code the page never uses.

In order of how often we see it: images uploaded straight off a phone at full size, a page builder or theme loading scripts for features you do not use, too many plugins, no caching, and cheap shared hosting. The first two account for most of it, and neither needs a rebuild to fix.

Yes, but less than people assume. Speed is a real ranking signal and a tie-breaker between pages of similar quality, so it will not lift a thin page above a good one. The bigger cost is visitors: people leave a slow page before it finishes loading, which hurts whether or not Google notices.

Usually, yes. Compressing images, removing unused plugins and turning on caching often moves a score twenty or thirty points in an afternoon. A rebuild is only the cheaper answer when the theme itself is the problem, which we will tell you plainly rather than selling you one.

Because that is where your customers are, and the desktop score flatters a site that is slow in the only place it matters. Most New Zealand small business traffic is a phone on mobile data, often outside a city.