For Newcastle businesses whose site takes a while to open
People leave a slow site before it finishes opening, and you paid for a good share of them to arrive.
A report on your own site, showing how long it takes to open on a phone and what is holding it up.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
2 minutes
Since it went live my phone hasn’t stopped ringing.
He created a stunning website for us that captures and nurtures leads with an automated email marketing system, which has filled a huge gap in the business and saved a lot of time (and money!).
Reece has been generous, reliable and knowledgeable in creating an online presence for our sporting club. He is good to work with and has good technical abilities.
Website speed optimisation matters for one reason, and it has nothing to do with technology. Somebody standing in a driveway on mobile data gives your site about three seconds, then goes back to the results and taps the next business.
They do not send you an email about it. The enquiry simply never arrives, and nothing on your end shows that it nearly did.
Enquiries you never hear about, and a share of every dollar spent on advertising. A click you paid for still counts when the person leaves before the page opens.
The people who leave are the ones you most want. Somebody searching on a phone, away from a desk, has a job that needs doing now.
Advertising is where it becomes a number you can see. If a quarter of the people who click leave before the page appears, a quarter of that month's ad spend bought nothing. The report still calls them visits.
Photographs put on straight off a camera, a pile of add-ons nobody removed, and hosting chosen on price. Those three cover almost every slow site in Newcastle.
Photographs are the big one and the easy one. A picture off a phone is often several megabytes and goes on the page at full size. A visitor on mobile data downloads every one of them to see the page.
Add-ons are the next. Every extra feature bolted on over the years keeps loading whether it is used or not, including the ones from a campaign that finished two years ago.
Hosting chosen on price is the third. The cheapest plans put hundreds of sites on one machine, so your page waits its turn behind somebody else's.
The photographs, then the add-ons, then the hosting. That order is deliberate: the first one is most of the problem on most sites, and it costs an afternoon.
Rebuilding the site is the last resort, not the first. Plenty of slow sites are perfectly good sites carrying forty pictures that were never resized.
Nobody rings to say your website was slow. They ring the next business, which is why this is the one fault a business can have for years without ever hearing about it.
Related reading from us: web design in Newcastle.
Readable in about two seconds on a phone on mobile data. That is where people stop leaving, and an ordinary small business site reaches it.
Rarely. Most slow sites in Newcastle are ordinary sites carrying full size photographs, and that is fixed without rebuilding anything.
It plays a part. The cost you feel first is the person who left, because a visitor who gives up before the page opens helps nobody.
The photographs and the add-ons are a day's work. Moving hosting is longer, and it only comes up where the hosting is the thing holding it back.
One monthly fee covering everything, month to month, with no lock-in contract. What it comes to depends on the business, so the number gets given on the call.