Website Speed Test: How Fast Are NZ Small Business Websites?
I ran a website speed test on 50 New Zealand small business websites in September 2026. On mobile, only 3 scored in Google's "good" range, and the typical site took 7.7 seconds to show its main content. Builders did best, electricians and accountants worst.
Most of the delay came from heavy pages and unused code. Every site was a real local business that ranks for its trade in its own city. No business is named here, because the point is the pattern.
How fast are NZ small business websites?
Most are slow on a phone. The median site scored 56.5 out of 100 on Google PageSpeed Insights, which Google counts as "needs improvement".
| Result (mobile) | Sites out of 50 |
|---|---|
| Good (90 to 100) | 3 |
| Needs improvement (50 to 89) | 25 |
| Poor (under 50) | 22 |
| Main content shown within 2.5 seconds | 4 |
| Main content took over 4 seconds | 42 |
Scores ranged from 18 to 99. The bands are Google's own, where 90 or above is good and under 50 is poor.
The main content timing is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Google's guidance calls 2.5 seconds or less good and anything over 4 seconds poor. By that measure, 42 of the 50 sites were poor.
How the website speed test was run
I searched Google for 10 trades in 5 cities, such as "plumber Auckland" and "hairdresser Dunedin". For each search I took the first organic result that was a local business's own site, skipping directories, marketplaces and national chains.
That gave 50 home pages across Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton and Dunedin. Each one went through PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting on 27 September 2026.
The mobile test simulates a mid-range phone on a mobile network. Visitors on fast phones and home wifi will often see quicker loads. Treat these results as a fair worst case, which is what a customer on a job site or in the car actually gets.
Which trades have the slowest websites?
Electricians, accountants, landscapers and roofers had the slowest sites in this test. Builders and painters did best. With five sites per trade, read this as a pattern worth checking, not a ranking.
Landscaping and hairdressing sites, which lean on photos of their work, had some of the longest waits in the test.
| Trade | Median mobile score | Median time to main content |
|---|---|---|
| Builder | 64 | 3.0 s |
| Painter | 62 | 6.9 s |
| Cleaner | 59 | 11.3 s |
| Plumber | 58 | 5.3 s |
| Hairdresser | 58 | 10.7 s |
| Mechanic | 53 | 7.5 s |
| Roofer | 48 | 8.5 s |
| Landscaper | 48 | 11.6 s |
| Accountant | 45 | 7.7 s |
| Electrician | 44 | 7.7 s |
Does the city or the platform make a difference?
The city does not change the test, because PageSpeed Insights runs from Google's servers. Dunedin sites had the best median score (62.5) and Wellington the worst (41), which reflects the sites themselves.
The platform showed a clearer split. I checked each home page's code for the platform it was built on.
| Platform | Sites | Median mobile score |
|---|---|---|
| Custom-built or other | 18 | 62.5 |
| WordPress | 20 | 53 |
| Hosted builders (Wix, Squarespace, Rocketspark, Duda and similar) | 12 | 43 |
None of the 12 hosted builder sites showed its main content within 4 seconds. That does not mean every Wix site is slow. It means the extra code these platforms load on every page is hard to strip back.
Why is my website slow? What the test found
The same few problems came up again and again. The biggest was code the page loads but never uses, flagged on 30 of the 50 sites.
- Unused JavaScript (30 sites). Page builders, chat widgets, sliders and tracking scripts load on every page, whether the page needs them or not.
- Heavy pages. The median home page weighed 3.1 MB. Seven were over 5 MB, and the heaviest was 12.8 MB, mostly photos.
- Unused CSS (20 sites). Theme styles for features the site never shows.
- Slow server response (5 sites). Cheap or overloaded hosting makes the first byte arrive late.
- Content that jumps while loading (8 sites). Images and banners without set sizes push the text around.
The basics of search were fine. The median SEO score was 100, so titles and descriptions were in place. Speed was the gap.
Is it the amount of content or the code?
Mostly the code. Heavier pages did score lower, but the clearest link in the results was how long scripts kept a phone busy before it could respond.
The 15 sites under 2 MB had a median score of 64, and the 11 sites over 4 MB had a median of 41. Yet one 8.7 MB site scored 92, because it loads photos only as you scroll and runs almost no scripts.
The typical site loaded 79 separate files and kept the phone busy for about half a second running JavaScript. Page builders, sliders, chat bubbles, review widgets and tracking tags all add to that. A site can carry plenty of photos and still be fast, as long as it holds back what the visitor cannot see yet.
How fast should a website load?
Aim to show your main content within 2.5 seconds on a phone, which is Google's "good" line for LCP. On PageSpeed Insights, 90 or above is good.
Speed helps, but it will not carry a weak page. Google says it "always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par." A fast page wins when several pages answer the question equally well.
For comparison, the Obie Digital home page scored 98 on the same mobile test, with main content in 1.7 seconds and a page weight of 83 KB. It is a small, new site with 11 files and no page builder, so it has less to carry than a site with years of add-ons. That lean approach is how I build custom websites for small NZ businesses.
How to run a page speed test on your own site
It takes two minutes and costs nothing.
- Open PageSpeed Insights and paste in your home page address.
- Check the Mobile tab first. It is the harder test, and the one customers on the road see.
- Note the Performance score and the Largest Contentful Paint time.
- Look at the top box. If it shows real-user data, that is how actual visitors experience your site. Only 11 of the 50 sites here had enough visitors for Google to show it.
- Run it twice. Scores move a few points between runs.
If your score is under 50, fix things in this order. Resize and compress the photos on your home page, remove plugins and widgets you do not use, then look at hosting. Google's LCP guide goes deeper on each step.
If the page needs a rebuild, what a website costs in NZ sets out the price ranges. A faster site also makes your SEO work and other marketing for tradies pay off sooner.
Want to know where your site sits? Send me your website address and I will run the same test and tell you the first thing to fix.