Search for a web designer in Brisbane and you get directories. The same three or four agencies appear near the top of most of them, ranked on reviews, awards and portfolio size. None of those lists measure the one thing every visitor experiences first: how long the page takes to show up.
What we did
We loaded each agency's homepage in a headless Chromium browser at 1440x900, from the same machine on the same connection, waiting for the full load event. For each site we recorded the time to load, the number of network requests, the bytes transferred, the number of scripts, and the number of DOM nodes on the page.
Then we ran our own site through the same script, because a benchmark you exclude yourself from is marketing, not measurement.
The numbers
| Load | Transferred | Requests | Scripts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| This site | 515ms | 0.53 MB | 56 | 15 |
| Agency A | 1,533ms | — | 69 | 27 |
| Agency B | 6,164ms | 5.63 MB | 175 | 53 |
| Agency C | 8,657ms | 11.14 MB | 271 | 67 |
Single run, one location, 5 August 2026. Agency A's transfer size is omitted because too many of its responses omitted a content-length header to total honestly. Names withheld — the point is the pattern, not a fight.
The slowest of them took over eight and a half seconds and moved eleven megabytes to show a homepage. On a phone on mobile data, that is a page a good number of people never see, because they leave first.
The cause is not mysterious
All three run WordPress on the same starter theme, assembled with the same page builder. That is not a moral failing — it is a rational business decision. A page builder means a junior can update a client's site, templates can be reused across projects, and a team can ship more sites per month.
But the cost lands on the visitor. Every builder adds its own CSS and JavaScript to every page, whether or not the page uses it. Stack a slider plugin, a form plugin, a cookie plugin, an animation library and a chat widget on top, and you are at 271 requests before anyone has read a word.
Speed is not a feature you add. It is what is left when you stop adding.
Why we build differently
Every site we build is hand-coded in Next.js. There is no builder shipping code we did not write, so a page contains what it needs and nothing else. That is the whole trick — there is no clever optimisation here, just an absence of weight.
It is worth being clear about the trade-off, because there is one. A hand-built site cannot be restructured by dragging boxes around in an admin panel. If that matters more to you than load time, a builder is the right answer and you should use one.
What you should not accept is paying custom-build prices for a page that takes eight seconds to arrive.
Check it yourself
Do not take our word for any of this. Open PageSpeed Insights, paste in your own site, then paste in your competitors'. It is free, it takes two minutes, and the number it gives you is the same number Google uses when deciding who to show first.