Website Speed Optimisation in NZ
We audit slow websites, fix what is actually holding them back, and get Core Web Vitals inside Google's thresholds. Same work we did on our own site — where a single audit removed over 250KB of JavaScript.
Slow is expensive
Speed is not a technical vanity metric. It decides how many visitors stay, how many convert, and — since Core Web Vitals became a ranking signal — how high you appear in New Zealand search results. Most sites we look at are not broken. They are simply carrying code, images and fonts nobody asked for.
of mobile visitors leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load, research shows
of New Zealand local business websites fail modern speed benchmarks, most taking five to six seconds to load, according to industry research
average annual revenue lost to poor website performance, across 206 businesses studied in 2026
What we audit
Every engagement starts with a measurement pass, not a guess. We profile the site on a real mobile connection, then rank each finding by how many milliseconds it is actually costing you.
JavaScript weight
Every library your pages load, weighed against what they do. Animation libraries, HTTP clients, icon packs, popup widgets and third-party scripts are the usual offenders — each one is downloaded before a visitor can interact with anything.
Images & fonts
Uncompressed hero images of three to five megabytes, legacy JPEG and PNG where WebP would do, missing lazy loading, and render-blocking font requests to an external CDN. We check weight variants too — our own Chinese font went from six to three.
Hosting & delivery
A server in the United States or Europe adds 200–400 milliseconds of latency to every single request from a New Zealand visitor. We check where your site is served from, whether a CDN is in play, and what caching is actually happening.
WordPress & platform overhead
WordPress speed optimisation is its own discipline: a plugin audit, theme cleanup and caching configuration. Sites accumulate plugins over years without anyone noticing the cumulative penalty. Builders like Wix and Squarespace carry the same unused-code problem.
The metrics we target
Google has used Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor since 2021. They are not abstract scores — each one measures something a visitor can feel. These are the targets we work to.
LCP — Largest Contentful Paint
How quickly your main content appears. Usually fixed with image formats, preload hints for above-the-fold content, and cutting render-blocking requests.
INP — Interaction to Next Paint
How quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Driven almost entirely by how much JavaScript the browser has to chew through first.
CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift
Whether the page jumps around while it loads. Reserved space for images, ads and late-loading fonts is what keeps it still.
We did it to our own site first
When our own site was not performing the way we tell clients theirs should, we ran the same audit on ourselves. Here is exactly what came off — no exotic techniques, just the ones we apply to client work.
Four general-purpose libraries in the bundle, fonts pulled from an external CDN on every visit, unoptimised images, and below-the-fold components loaded upfront whether a visitor scrolled or not.
Over 250KB removed from the JavaScript bundle. Fonts self-hosted through Next.js font optimisation, with our Chinese font cut from six weight variants to three. Every image converted to WebP with proper sizing, preload hints above the fold and lazy loading below it. Carousels, capability lists and counters now load on demand.
- Axios → the browser's built-in fetch API
- SweetAlert2 → native browser dialogs
- React Icons → Lucide React, which tree-shakes to only the icons we use
- Framer Motion → plain CSS transitions
We publish the number we measured: 250KB+ of JavaScript removed. We do not publish a before-and-after Lighthouse score — our audit recorded the bundle reduction rather than a paired score, and we would rather show you the measurement we actually have.
Case Studies
How the work runs
Three stages. You see the numbers at every one, so the improvement is never something you have to take on faith.
01 — Measure
We run your site through PageSpeed Insights and a full performance profile, on mobile first — that is what most of your customers experience, and what Google uses for ranking decisions. You get the baseline in writing.
02 — Fix, in order of impact
Bundle reduction, image and font strategy, lazy loading, caching and delivery, plugin or theme cleanup on WordPress. We start with whatever is costing the most milliseconds rather than whatever is easiest.
03 — Re-measure
The same tests again, side by side with the baseline. If a change did not move a number, we say so and move on to the next one.
Turnaround
Send us your URL and we will reply within 24 hours with what we found and what it would take to fix. Scope for the fix work depends entirely on what the audit turns up, so we quote it once we have measured — we do not publish a fixed turnaround we cannot stand behind.
What it costs
Optimisation work is quoted per site, because a plugin cleanup and a stack migration are not the same job. What we can publish are our build prices — the reference point if the audit concludes your current platform is the limit. Builds of that kind go live in two to six weeks.
A themed build on an existing template. Fast to ship, limited room to tune once the theme's own code is the bottleneck.
A customised build with room to control the bundle, the images and the delivery layer properly.
E-commerce, bookings, member accounts, multi-language or an admin backend — where performance work and business logic have to be designed together.
Starter sites from $499 · Custom projects transparently quoted. Build costs only; 15% GST is added on top.
Questions we get asked
- How do I know if my website is actually slow?
- Put your URL into Google PageSpeed Insights — it takes under a minute. A performance score of 90–100 means you are in good shape, 50–89 means you are losing some visitors to speed, and 0–49 means you are almost certainly losing significant traffic and revenue. Look at the mobile score in particular: that is what most of your customers experience and what Google uses for ranking.
- What makes websites slow in the first place?
- Three things account for most of it. Oversized images, often three to five megabytes straight off a phone or camera. Unused code — plugins, animation libraries, chat widgets and social embeds that load hundreds of kilobytes nobody uses. And distance: a server in the United States or Europe adds 200–400 milliseconds of latency to every request from New Zealand.
- Do you do WordPress speed optimisation?
- Yes. WordPress sites are the most common case we see, because plugins accumulate over years and each one has a weight. The work is a plugin audit, theme cleanup and caching configuration, plus the usual image and font strategy. If the theme itself is the bottleneck, we will tell you that rather than sell you a tune-up that cannot get there.
- Why does mobile speed optimisation matter more than desktop?
- Because that is where your customers are, and it is the harsher test — mobile connections and mobile processors punish heavy JavaScript far more than a desktop does. Google also uses the mobile experience for ranking decisions. We profile mobile first for both reasons.
- Will faster load times actually improve my Google ranking?
- Core Web Vitals have been a ranking factor since 2021, so speed is part of the picture — but it is one signal among many, not a substitute for content and relevance. Where it matters most is the tiebreak: if a competitor's site is faster and comparable otherwise, they can rank ahead of you.
- Can I not just do this myself?
- Some of it, yes, and we would rather you did. Compress images with a free tool, remove plugins and features you are not using, and check whether your host has servers near New Zealand. Beyond that — bundle reduction, font strategy, lazy loading, Core Web Vitals tuning — you are into code-level work, which is where we come in.
- Do you work outside Auckland?
- Yes. We are based in Auckland and work with clients across New Zealand. Performance work is measured remotely and delivered remotely, so location makes no practical difference to how the engagement runs.
Send us your URL
Tell us the address and what feels slow. We will run it, tell you what we found, and reply within 24 hours.
Get in touch