Accountants score 68.9 on mobile
We tested 211 Australian accounting firms with Google Lighthouse on a throttled mobile connection. Their mean performance score was 68.9 out of 100, 6.9 points above the 12,621-site mean of 62.0. 14.7% scored under 50, Lighthouse's own poor band.
That puts accountants 3rd of the 44 industries in the study with at least 80 sites.
How accounting firms compare with every site we tested
Across all 12,621 sites the median performance score is 61 and 74.3% take longer than four seconds to show their main content. Among accounting firms, 14.7% scored poor, which is fewer than the 27.3% across the whole study. The median lab load is 6.1s, faster than the all-sites 6.9s.
In the ranking, the next industry up is IT Consultant at 69.0, and the next down is Builder at 67.0.Industries this close together are separated by a few points at most, which is inside the run-to-run noise on a single Lighthouse test.
Against the professional services group
The study does not publish a platform split for individual industries, so here is the comparison it does support. The professional services group holds 1,560 sites with a mean score of 64.0, 23.7% scoring poor and a median lab load of 6.4s.
Accountants sit 4.9 points above that group mean. Their poor share is 14.7% against 23.7%, and their median load is 6.1s against 6.4s.
We place Accountant in the professional services group because that is where accounting, tax and advisory labels sit.
What a slow site costs a accounting firm
Someone choosing an accountant is usually handing over bank details, tax history and a business structure. They are already cautious before they reach your site, and a page that hangs on a phone screen reads as a firm that is careless with detail. It is a fair judgement and the visitor makes it in the first few seconds.
Accounting enquiries also arrive in bursts. Tax time, BAS dates and the end of the financial year send people searching on their phones, between jobs, on whatever connection they have. A slow home page in that window does not announce itself. The visitor simply goes back to the results and tries the next firm.
Most accounting sites are near-identical in what they say, so speed and clarity are among the few differences a stranger can actually see.
We have not put a dollar figure on this, because the data we hold measures speed, not revenue. The honest version is smaller: a median lab load of 6.1s is 2.4 times Google's 2.5-second bar for a good result.
Three things to check on your own site
Open your home page on mobile data, not office wifi
Turn wifi off on your phone and load the home page cold. Count how long before you can read the first heading and tap a button. If you looked away, a stranger would have too.
Find the weight in your team and partner photos
Partner headshots are the usual culprit on accounting sites. Right-click one, open it in a new tab and look at the file size. A headshot that is several megabytes is being downloaded in full on every mobile visit.
Test the page people reach in tax season
Your home page is rarely the only landing page. Run the tax return, BAS or small business page through the free audit, since that is the page a search for that service lands on.
Or skip the manual version and run your site through our free audit. If it comes back slow, the Fix Sprint is the smallest way we work on that, and our accountant web design page covers a full rebuild.
These figures are the Accountant row of the industry table in our 2026 Lighthouse study of 12,621 Australian small business websites, tested once each on mobile between 25 May and 5 September 2026. Industry is the business's own listed category. We publish an industry only when it has at least 80 sites, and these six pages cover the largest six with at least 100.
Poor means a performance score under 50. LCP is lab Largest Contentful Paint. Every figure here is a mean unless it says median. A single Lighthouse run can move by five to ten points, so the group figures are reliable and any one site's score is not.
The sample is skewed toward the local service businesses we prospect, so it describes sites we could find and test, not every accounting firm in Australia.
Where does your accounting firm sit?
A twenty-minute call is enough to look at your site together and say plainly whether speed is costing you enquiries. The Blueprint is the written version, with scope and a fixed price.