Read more: how to check if your site is down.
What we found. The median small-business site in our study loaded in 686 ms. The 90th percentile took 2,429 ms.
Slow is not the same as broken
A broken site returns an error or a blank page. A slow site returns the page eventually. From a visitor's point of view, a site that takes seven seconds to show the first thing is functionally broken: most people will leave before then.
The 90th percentile of the small business sites we measured loaded in 2,429 milliseconds. That is borderline. A few hundred milliseconds more and visitors start to bounce.
How to tell which one you have
Open your site on a fresh phone with the cache cleared. If it loads in under three seconds on a normal 4G connection, you are fine. If it shows a browser error, you are broken. Anything in between is the grey zone we see in the data, and the fix is usually a faster host, a lighter theme, or fewer plugins.
If you do not have a fresh phone to hand, the checker measures both availability and load time and tells you which one is the problem.
Questions we get about this
My site loads fine on Wi-Fi. Why would it be slow on a phone?
Real mobile networks are slower than home Wi-Fi, and modern phones throttle background tabs. If your site is right on the edge, the network will be the first place it falls over.
How fast should a small business site actually be?
Aim for under 1.5 seconds to first paint on a normal 4G connection. That is fast enough that visitors do not notice the load.
Is the checker going to tell me my site is "slow"?
Yes. The verdict has a tier between working and broken for sites that load but have a problem.
Ready to is my site broken, or just slow??
Email shoaib@localsiteshop.com and tell us about the site. We will reply same day with a fixed quote and a date.
Email usOr first, run your site through the free checker and see the verdict in 10 seconds.