The Speed Delusion: Why Your Developer is Lying to You
I’m going to start with a hard truth that most Brisbane web agencies won't admit: Your 100/100 Google PageSpeed Insights score is a vanity metric. It’s the digital equivalent of a bodybuilder who can’t lift a grocery bag.
Last month, I sat down with a business owner in Fortitude Valley who had just spent $12,000 on a custom WordPress build. He was beaming because his developer showed him a report with green circles across the board. The problem? His actual customers—people sitting on a patchy 4G connection on the train from Milton—were waiting six seconds for the 'Buy Now' button to become clickable.
We’ve reached a point in 2026 where speed optimisation has become a game of 'faking it' for bots while ignoring the human being on the other side of the glass. If you are chasing scores instead of actual usability, you are lighting money on fire.
In this deep dive, we’re going to stop talking about generic 'optimisation' and start looking at the specific, expensive mistakes that are currently sabotaging Australian SMEs.
1. The 'Heavy Theme' Trap: Lipstick on a Pig
One of the most common blunders I see—especially with businesses using off-the-shelf Shopify or WordPress themes—is trying to 'optimise' a fundamentally bloated foundation.
You cannot take a 4MB theme packed with 50 different pre-installed features you don’t use, slap a caching plugin on top, and call it 'fast.' That’s like putting a spoiler on a 1998 Toyota Corolla and expecting it to win at Lakeside Park.
The Mistake: Over-reliance on Multi-Purpose Themes
These themes come with CSS and JavaScript for every possible layout: sliders, portfolios, testimonials, and 15 different header styles. Even if you only use one header, the browser still has to download, parse, and execute the code for the other 14.The Fix: Start with a 'headless' approach or a minimalist framework where you only load what you need. If you aren't a developer, at least demand a site built with a 'blank slate' builder (like Oxygen or GeneratePress) rather than a bloated monster like Avada or Divi.
2. The 'Retina' Image Obsession (and the Brisbane Reality)
I get it. You want your high-end products to look crisp. But here is a reality check: a 5MB hero image of a luxury kitchen in Ascot is the fastest way to make a mobile user bounce.
Most agencies tell you to 'compress your images.' That’s basic. What they don’t tell you is that resolution is the real killer. I’ve seen sites serving 4000px wide images to iPhones that are only 390px wide. The phone’s processor has to work overtime just to resize that image in real-time, which causes 'jank'—that annoying stutter when you try to scroll.
The Mistake: Ignoring Device-Specific Delivery
It’s not enough to use WebP anymore. That’s 2022 thinking. You need to be serving different image dimensions based on the user's viewport. If your site isn't using 'srcset' attributes to serve a 400px image to a phone and a 1200px image to a desktop, you’re failing.Furthermore, many people think they've solved speed just by shrinking files, but real speed drives sales through perceived performance, not just raw file size. If the image takes 2 seconds to appear but the rest of the page is frozen while it loads, you've already lost the customer.
3. The Third-Party Script Bloat (The Silent Killer)
This drives me absolutely nuts. A client will come to us wondering why their site feels sluggish. We look under the hood and find: - Three different Facebook Pixel snippets (because they forgot the old ones). - A Hotjar script they haven't looked at in six months. - A 'Live Chat' widget that loads 1MB of JavaScript before the headline even appears. - Four different Google Font weights that aren't even used on the page.
Every time you add a 'helpful' marketing tool, you are adding a tax to your load speed. Most of these scripts are 'render-blocking,' meaning the browser stops everything to deal with them.
The Mistake: Tag Manager Neglect
Google Tag Manager is a blessing and a curse. It makes it too easy to add junk. I’ve seen Brisbane marketing managers 'test' a new pop-up tool, decide they don't like it, but leave the script running in GTM for three years.The Fix: Audit your scripts every quarter. If you aren't actively using the data from a tool, delete it. Use 'Partytown' or similar libraries to move these scripts to a 'Web Worker' so they don't clog up the main thread where your customers are trying to click buttons.
4. The Mobile-First Lie
Everyone says they are 'mobile-first.' Almost nobody actually is. Usually, a designer sits at a 27-inch iMac in a trendy studio in Newstead, builds a beautiful desktop site, and then 'shrinks' it for mobile.
This is backwards. When you 'hide' elements on mobile using CSS (display: none), the browser still downloads them. You might not see that massive 4K video background on your phone, but your data plan and your processor are still paying for it.
We’ve written before about why the mobile-first approach is often a lie in practice. If your 'mobile' site is just a squished version of your desktop site, your 'Time to Interactive' (TTI) is likely abysmal.
The Mistake: Prioritising Aesthetics Over Interaction
In Queensland, we have huge areas with 'dead zones' or congested 4G. If your site requires 2MB of JS just to render a menu, a user in a regional area or even a basement cafe in the CBD is going to give up.5. The 'Plugin for Everything' Syndrome
This is the hallmark of a lazy developer. Need a contact form? Plugin. Need a slider? Plugin. Need to change a font? Plugin.
Every plugin adds 'hooks' to your WordPress installation. Many of them load their own CSS and JS files on every single page, even if the plugin is only used on the 'Contact' page.
The Case Study: We recently took over a site for a local tradesman. He had 42 active plugins. His 'speed score' wasn't actually that bad because he had a very aggressive caching layer, but the site felt 'heavy.' It took 1.5 seconds just for the server to respond (Time to First Byte). We cut the plugins down to 12, hard-coded the simple stuff, and the site felt instant.
6. LCP is Not the Whole Story
Google loves 'Largest Contentful Paint' (LCP). It’s a core web vital. But focusing solely on LCP is a trap. You can have a great LCP because your hero image loads fast, but if the user tries to scroll or click a 'Filter' button and the page hangs for 500ms, they will perceive the site as broken.
This is called 'Interaction to Next Paint' (INP), and as of 2024/2025, it’s the metric that actually matters for conversions. If your site is 'fast' but unresponsive, you’re stuck in a Core Web Vitals trap that looks good in a report but fails in the real world.
The Mistake: Ignoring Main Thread Work
JavaScript is the primary culprit here. When your browser is busy executing complex JS, it can't respond to user input. Stop using heavy libraries like jQuery if you only need one small animation. Use native CSS for animations wherever possible.7. Hosting on the Cheap
If you are paying $5 a month for 'Unlimited' hosting, you are being throttled. Period.
Shared hosting means you are sharing a server's resources with thousands of other websites. If one of those sites gets a traffic spike, your site slows down.
The Brisbane Factor: If your customers are in Queensland, why is your server in Ohio? Physical distance matters. The 'Round Trip Time' (RTT) for data to travel across the Pacific adds hundreds of milliseconds to every request.
The Fix: Use a host with Australian servers (Sydney or Melbourne). Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare, but don't just 'turn it on'—you need to configure the 'Edge Rules' to actually cache your content properly.
8. The 'Lazy Loading' Backfire
Lazy loading is great—it tells the browser not to load an image until it’s about to appear on the screen. But I see people lazy-loading their Hero Image (the main image at the top of the page).
This is a disaster. It tells the browser: 'Wait until the user scrolls to show the most important thing on the screen.' This destroys your LCP score and makes the site look broken for the first few seconds.
The Fix: Always 'eager' load or 'fetchpriority="high"' your first 2-3 images (logo, hero, first product image) and lazy-load everything else below the fold.
How to Actually Test Your Speed (The Non-BS Way)
Stop using your office Wi-Fi to test your site. You have a cached version of the site on a high-speed fibre connection. Of course it feels fast to you.
Instead: 1. Open Chrome Incognito mode. 2. Open DevTools (F12). 3. Go to the 'Network' tab. 4. Change 'No Throttling' to 'Mid-tier Mobile' or 'Slow 4G'. 5. Hit refresh.
That is what your customer is experiencing. If it takes more than 3 seconds to become usable, you are losing at least 30% of your potential leads.
Summary of Actionable Steps
If you want to move the needle this week, don't go chasing 100/100 scores. Do this instead:
1. Audit your Third-Party Scripts: Delete any tracking pixel or widget that hasn't provided a report you've read in the last 30 days. 2. Kill the Sliders: Carousels are speed killers and nobody clicks them anyway. Replace them with a single, high-quality, optimised static image. 3. Check your Hosting Location: If you're targeting Brisbane, ensure your server is in Australia. 4. Prioritise Interaction: Use the 'INP' metric in Google Search Console to see where users are getting frustrated with laggy buttons. 5. Simplify the CSS: If your developer is using a massive framework like Bootstrap just to make a button blue, tell them to use plain CSS.
Conclusion
Page speed isn't about pleasing Google's robots; it's about respecting your customer's time. In a world where attention spans are shorter than a TikTok clip, a slow website is a 'closed' sign on your digital front door.
Stop accepting 'green scores' as proof of performance. Start testing your site on a real phone, on a real 4G network, in a real Brisbane suburb. If it feels slow to you, it feels slow to your customers—and they won't wait around to tell you about it; they'll just click the next result on Google.
At Local Marketing Group, we don't just build websites that look pretty; we build high-performance assets designed to convert. If you’re tired of your site feeling like it’s stuck in second gear, let’s have a real conversation about performance.