Catering score 63.8 on mobile
We tested 161 Australian catering businesses with Google Lighthouse on a throttled mobile connection. Their mean performance score was 63.8 out of 100, 1.8 points above the 12,621-site mean of 62.0. 26.7% scored under 50, Lighthouse's own poor band.
That puts catering 24th of the 44 industries in the study with at least 80 sites.
How catering businesses 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 catering businesses, 26.7% scored poor, which is fewer than the 27.3% across the whole study. The median lab load is 7.4s, slower than the all-sites 6.9s.
In the ranking, the next industry up is Cafe at 64.0, and the next down is Plumber at 63.7.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 hospitality group
The study does not publish a platform split for individual industries, so here is the comparison it does support. The hospitality group holds 860 sites with a mean score of 61.6, 28.3% scoring poor and a median lab load of 7.5s.
Catering sit 2.2 points above that group mean. Their poor share is 26.7% against 28.3%, and their median load is 7.4s against 7.5s.
We place Catering in the hospitality group, alongside restaurant and cafe labels.
What a slow site costs a catering business
Catering enquiries often come from someone planning an event on a deadline, comparing a handful of caterers on their phone, often during a work break. They want to see menus, get a feel for the food and send an enquiry. A page that is slow to show food photography loses the one thing that sells the business.
Caterers are photo-heavy by necessity. Menu shots, event galleries and platters are the product, and they are also the largest files on the site. The better the photography, the more likely it is that nobody has resized it for a phone.
Enquiry volume can be uneven too, with spring and the end-of-year season carrying much of the year. A site that struggles during those weeks costs the most when demand is highest.
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 7.4s is 3.0 times Google's 2.5-second bar for a good result.
Three things to check on your own site
Scroll your gallery on mobile data
Open your event gallery with wifi off. Watch whether images load as you scroll or whether the whole page waits for all of them before it responds.
Check whether your menus are PDFs
A menu that opens as a large PDF on a phone is slow and hard to read. Open yours on mobile and see how long it takes and whether text is legible.
Test the enquiry form for a date and headcount
Fill in a fake event enquiry on your phone. Date pickers and number fields are where mobile forms most often break.
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.
These figures are the Catering 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 catering business in Australia.
Where does your catering business 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.