Psychologists and counsellors score 63.1 on mobile
We tested 166 Australian psychology and counselling practices with Google Lighthouse on a throttled mobile connection. Their mean performance score was 63.1 out of 100, 1.1 points above the 12,621-site mean of 62.0. 15.7% scored under 50, Lighthouse's own poor band.
That puts psychologists and counsellors 29th of the 44 industries in the study with at least 80 sites.
How psychology and counselling 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 psychology and counselling practices, 15.7% scored poor, which is fewer than the 27.3% across the whole study. The median lab load is 6.9s, slower than the all-sites 6.9s.
In the ranking, the next industry up is Allied Health at 63.2, and the next down is Gym at 63.1.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 health group
The study does not publish a platform split for individual industries, so here is the comparison it does support. The health group holds 1,498 sites with a mean score of 61.3, 26.2% scoring poor and a median lab load of 7.0s.
Psychologists and counsellors sit 1.8 points above that group mean. Their poor share is 15.7% against 26.2%, and their median load is 6.9s against 7.0s.
We place Psychologist / Counsellor in the health group. The study's groups are keyword-matched, so some sites with these labels may sit in fitness/wellness instead.
What a slow site costs a psychology or counselling practice
Someone searching for a psychologist or counsellor is often doing it at a hard moment, quietly, on a phone, and is likely to try one or two practices before making contact. The first thing they feel about your practice is how the page behaves. A calm, quick page is part of the care they are looking for.
A first contact for therapy is a big step to take, and a booking form that is slow or confusing is an easy reason to put it off.
Practices also tend to run small sites with a few pages: who we see, fees, how to book. That makes the home page the page that matters, and any weight on it is felt on every visit.
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 6.9s is 2.8 times Google's 2.5-second bar for a good result.
Three things to check on your own site
Check how fast your booking link appears
Many practices embed a third-party booking system. Load your page on mobile data and see how long the booking button takes to show up and respond.
Review your fees and services page on a phone
Open the page that explains fees and rebates. Make sure the text is readable without zooming and that no embedded widget pushes it down the screen while loading.
Look for heavy stock imagery
Calming hero photography is common on practice sites. Check the file size of your hero image. A soft background photo should not be the heaviest thing on the page.
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 Psychologist / Counsellor 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 psychology or counselling practice in Australia. The separate label Psychologist is reported on its own in the study and is not merged into this page.
Where does your psychology or counselling 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.