Web designers score 66.3 on mobile
We tested 169 Australian web designers with Google Lighthouse on a throttled mobile connection. Their mean performance score was 66.3 out of 100, 4.3 points above the 12,621-site mean of 62.0. 18.9% scored under 50, Lighthouse's own poor band.
That puts web designers 8th of the 44 industries in the study with at least 80 sites.
How web designers 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 web designers, 18.9% scored poor, which is fewer than the 27.3% across the whole study. The median lab load is 5.2s, faster than the all-sites 6.9s.
In the ranking, the next industry up is Conveyancer at 66.6, and the next down is Yoga Studio at 66.2.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 creative/agency group
The study does not publish a platform split for individual industries, so here is the comparison it does support. The creative/agency group holds 907 sites with a mean score of 63.8, 24.1% scoring poor and a median lab load of 6.2s.
Web designers sit 2.5 points above that group mean. Their poor share is 18.9% against 24.1%, and their median load is 5.2s against 6.2s.
We place Web Designer in the creative/agency group, alongside graphic design and photography labels.
What a slow site costs a web design business
A web designer's own site is the sample they hand a prospect. A buyer who cannot tell good work from bad judges the studio on how its own site feels, and the plainest signal available is whether it opens quickly on their phone. There is no separate brochure to hide behind.
Portfolios are heavy by nature. Full-bleed case-study images, video loops, scroll animation and web fonts all add up, and they are the elements that most often make a portfolio slower than the work it advertises.
This group is in the six largest by sample size, and we are a studio ourselves. We have not exempted our own line of work from the same test.
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 5.2s is 2.1 times Google's 2.5-second bar for a good result.
Three things to check on your own site
Load your portfolio over a throttled connection
In Chrome developer tools, set the network to Slow 4G and reload your case-study page. Watch how long the first image takes to appear.
Audit your case-study media
List every image and video on one case study and its file size. Anything above the fold that was exported for a retina desktop and not resized for a phone is worth fixing first.
Check what your animation costs
Scroll effects and page transitions run on the visitor's phone, not yours. Turn off JavaScript animation libraries one at a time and see which one moves your score.
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 Web Designer 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 web design business in Australia.
Where does your web design 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.