Website performance audit

A website performance audit finds out what slows your site down and what to fix first. I measure how fast your pages are for real visitors, test them in the lab, review the code, scripts and hosting behind them, and hand you a prioritised plan. Fixed price, agreed up front, and about 1 week from go-ahead to walkthrough.

What does a website performance audit include?

Everything that decides how fast your pages load and respond to visitors, and a plan your team can act on at the end.

I look at the pages we agree on in the proposal, usually your homepage and the page types that matter most to your business, such as product, category or landing pages. Pages of one type share a template, so a fix found on one product page usually helps all of them. More pages can be added and are quoted separately.

The audit includes:

• Core Web Vitals analysis (loading, responsiveness, visual stability) from real-user and lab data
• Review of JavaScript, CSS, images, fonts, third-party scripts, caching and hosting
• A prioritised action plan, walked through with your team in 60 minutes

How does the audit work?

Measure first, then find the causes, then put the fixes in order. From your go-ahead to the walkthrough, it takes about 1 week.

1. Scope. You tell me about your site, your goals and what worries you, in a short call or by email. We agree on the pages and the questions that matter.
2. Proposal. I send you a written proposal with the scope, the fixed price and the timeline. A reply such as "I accept" is enough to start.
3. Measure. I collect real-user data from the Chrome UX Report, Google's dataset of real visits in Chrome, wherever your site has enough traffic for it. Then I run lab tests with Lighthouse, the test behind PageSpeed Insights.
4. Find the causes. I trace each slow metric back to what causes it: an image the browser finds late, a heavy script, a slow server response, a third-party tag. This is where the code, the build and the hosting come in.
5. Plan. Every finding becomes an action with its expected impact and effort, in the order I'd tackle them.
6. Walkthrough. I take your team through the findings and the plan and answer their questions. One round of corrections and clarifications after your review is included.

What do audits of slow sites usually find?

Rarely one big problem. Usually it is several smaller ones that add up: a main image the browser finds late, a slow server response, a pile of third-party scripts, heavy pages.

The table shows the medians across the 164 slow sites I audited between 16 September 2026 and 7 October 2026. I picked those sites because they looked slow, so the numbers describe slow sites, not websites in general. I don't name any of them.

If a team tells me "but the image is already compressed", it usually is. On the median slow site I audited, the main image waited 1.29 s before its download started, then downloaded in 0.17 s. Compressing it further trims the short part. Letting the browser find it sooner fixes the long one.

Every finding, the method and its limits are in my report Core Web Vitals in New Zealand, 2026.

What does a performance audit cost?

A fixed price, quoted in the proposal once we have agreed the scope. You approve it in writing before any work starts, and it only changes if we agree to change the scope. The scoping call is free.

Prices exclude GST. For clients outside New Zealand, the service is generally zero-rated, so no GST is added.

The price covers the analysis, the report and plan, the walkthrough and one round of corrections after your review. Implementing the fixes isn't part of an audit, and neither are design changes or new features.

Scope, payment and the rest in writing: my terms of service.

Do you need access to our code?

Not to start. The first part of the audit works on your public website and Google's public data, so I can begin before anyone sets up an account.

For the deeper part, read access to your repository and your analytics helps a lot. The code shows why a script loads early or an image arrives late. Analytics shows which pages and devices your visitors actually use. Read access is enough: an audit changes nothing on your systems.

And yes, I'm happy to sign your NDA first.

What happens after the audit?

You decide. The plan is yours, and no ongoing contract with me is needed.

Your developers can work through it themselves: each item says what to change, why, and what it should improve. If you would rather have me implement the fixes, on my own or together with your team, that is an optimisation sprint.

The audit's measurements become your baseline. Fixes are measured against it the same way and on the same pages, so you can see what each change did. Lab tests show a change the same day, but Google's real-user data covers the last 28 days, so it takes a few weeks to catch up.

Speed doesn't stay fixed on its own. New content, scripts and features slow a site down again over time, and performance budgets in your build pipeline plus monitoring catch that before your customers notice.

Sprints and ongoing support are part of my website performance optimisation services.

Is a performance audit right for my site?

An audit fits when slow pages cost you something, such as sales, leads or ad spend, and you want to know what to fix first before you spend developer time on it.

I audit online shops, marketing and content sites on a headless CMS, SaaS products and data-heavy web apps, and I work with agencies that bring me in for a client. My focus is JavaScript-based stacks: React, Next.js, Angular and Node.js, headless CMSs such as Storyblok, and shop systems such as Shopware and Shopify.

I've been building websites since 2012, with performance part of the work from the start: online shops for ABOUT YOU, Tchibo and hygi.de, and Volkswagen's car configurator and CMS. On a recent greenfield build, one Next.js platform for several education academies, Google's page-speed scores came out around 95 out of 100.

Not sure an audit is worth it yet? Start with the free speed check, a short first look at your site from public data, with no obligation. The audit adds what the check can't see, such as your code, your build, your hosting and your analytics, and turns the findings into a plan. If an audit isn't worth it for your site, I'll tell you.

Tell me your URL and what worries you about its speed. I'll reply with the next step: a proposal for an audit, or the free speed check if that's the better start.

Ask about an audit