Financial planners score 62.9 on mobile
We tested 176 Australian financial planning practices with Google Lighthouse on a throttled mobile connection. Their mean performance score was 62.9 out of 100, 0.9 points above the 12,621-site mean of 62.0. 25.6% scored under 50, Lighthouse's own poor band.
That puts financial planners 32nd of the 44 industries in the study with at least 80 sites.
How financial planning practices 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 financial planning practices, 25.6% scored poor, which is fewer than the 27.3% across the whole study. The median lab load is 6.5s, faster than the all-sites 6.9s.
In the ranking, the next industry up is Pool Builder at 63.0, and the next down is Real Estate Agent at 62.7.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 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.
Financial planners sit 1.1 points below that group mean. Their poor share is 25.6% against 23.7%, and their median load is 6.5s against 6.4s.
We place Financial Planner in the professional services group, alongside accounting and legal labels.
What a slow site costs a financial planning practice
A financial planner is asking a stranger to trust them with retirement savings or a family's long-term plan. People comparing planners tend to look at several sites in one sitting, usually on a phone first, and then decide who to ring. The site that loads first and reads clearly gets the call, because nothing else is separating the options yet.
Planning practices also lean on credentials, licensing statements and disclosure documents. These are the heavy parts of the page, and they are often added without anyone checking what they do to load time.
The cost here is not a lost sale you can see in a report. It is the person who opened your page, waited, and did not become an enquiry.
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 6.5s is 2.6 times Google's 2.5-second bar for a good result.
Three things to check on your own site
Check your disclosure and credentials blocks
Licence numbers, logos of professional bodies and embedded PDFs sit on most planner sites. Confirm they load after the main content, not before it.
Look at embedded tools and calculators
Retirement calculators and booking widgets are often third-party scripts. Open your page with the browser developer tools on the Network tab and see how many outside domains it calls.
Ring-test your own booking path on a phone
Starting from a Google search for your practice name, time how long it takes to get from the result to a booked first meeting. Every extra screen is a place to lose someone.
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 Financial Planner 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 financial planning practice in Australia.
Where does your financial planning practice 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.