Website speed is one of the most important — and most overlooked — factors in digital marketing. A slow website loses visitors, damages your Google rankings, and costs you leads. The good news is that checking your website speed takes less than two minutes, and doing it regularly should become a habit.
The Best Free Tools to Check Website Speed
Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) is the gold standard. Enter your URL and get a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop, along with specific recommendations. GTmetrix (gtmetrix.com) provides a detailed waterfall chart showing how each element on your page loads, helping you identify exactly what’s slowing you down. Pingdom (tools.pingdom.com) allows you to test your site speed from different global locations, which is useful if you serve customers in multiple regions.
What Is a Good Website Speed Score?
On Google PageSpeed Insights, a score of 90–100 is considered ‘Good’, 50–89 is ‘Needs Improvement’, and 0–49 is ‘Poor’. For load time, aim for your page to be fully interactive in under 3 seconds on mobile. If you’re over 5 seconds, you’re likely losing a significant percentage of visitors before they even see your content.
Why Mobile Speed Matters More Than Desktop
Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it primarily crawls and ranks the mobile version of your site. Always check your mobile score first. Most New Zealand websites score significantly lower on mobile than desktop because the desktop version hasn’t been properly optimised for smaller screens and slower connections.
Common Causes of a Slow Website
The most common culprits are large, uncompressed images (use WebP format and compress before uploading), too many plugins (especially on WordPress), cheap or shared hosting with slow server response times, unminified CSS and JavaScript files, no caching or CDN in place, and third-party scripts like chat widgets, pop-up tools, and tracking pixels that all add load time.
Quick Wins to Speed Up Your Site
Compress all images before uploading them — tools like Squoosh.app make this easy. Install a caching plugin if you’re on WordPress (WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache are popular choices). Enable lazy loading so images below the fold only load when a user scrolls to them. Remove any plugins or scripts you don’t actively use.
When to Call in a Professional
If your PageSpeed score is below 50 on mobile and you’ve already tried the quick wins, it’s time to get a developer involved. Server-level optimisation, code minification, and CDN configuration require technical expertise — but the payoff in rankings and conversions is well worth the investment.