We speed-tested the websites of 20 established Cheltenham businesses — estate agents, solicitors, builders, salons, accountants and local institutions — using Google’s own Lighthouse tool. Not to embarrass anyone (results below are anonymised by sector), but to answer a question every local business owner should ask: how fast is the bar in this town, and where do I stand?
The short answer: the bar is low. If your website is quick, you have a genuine local advantage going spare.
The headline numbers
- Average performance score: 57/100. Google’s “good” threshold is 90. Only 2 of the 20 sites reached it.
- 8 of 20 scored under 50 — the band Google explicitly labels “poor”.
- The slowest homepage took 16 seconds to show anything on a mobile connection. Its main content took 37 seconds. Nobody waits that long.
- 7 of 20 homepages weigh over 5MB — one was over 25MB, roughly the size of a short video, just to show a homepage.
- 5 of 20 have a server that takes over 600ms to even begin responding — a classic sign of cheap, oversold hosting.
The full results (anonymised by sector)
| Rank | Sector | Performance /100 | Main content visible (LCP) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Trades & construction | 99 | 1.1s |
| 2 | Hair & beauty | 96 | 2.6s |
| 3 | Leisure & civic | 81 | 4.0s |
| 4 | Estate agents | 75 | 5.6s |
| 5 | Trades & construction | 71 | 6.1s |
| 6 | Estate agents | 70 | 6.5s |
| 7 | Solicitors | 62 | 18.7s |
| 8 | Solicitors | 60 | 10.0s |
| 9 | Hair & beauty | 58 | 14.4s |
| 10 | Hair & beauty | 57 | 9.8s |
| 11 | Trades & construction | 55 | 42.0s |
| 12 | Trades & construction | 55 | 16.6s |
| 13 | Food & hospitality | 49 | 10.9s |
| 14 | Accountants | 45 | 19.5s |
| 15 | Trades & construction | 42 | 8.2s |
| 16 | Leisure & civic | 41 | 9.3s |
| 17 | Solicitors | 38 | 14.4s |
| 18 | Hair & beauty | 34 | 15.4s |
| 19 | Estate agents | 32 | 19.0s |
| 20 | Leisure & civic | 29 | 37.4s |
Method: Google Lighthouse 12, mobile profile, performance category, one run per homepage, June 2026. Sites chosen to represent a spread of established local sectors; results anonymised because the point is the pattern, not the pillory. For honest comparison: this website scores 99/100 with main content visible in 1.9s — and we publish that because we’d expect to be held to it.
Why this matters (it’s not about vanity scores)
Google uses page speed as a ranking signal, so for two otherwise similar Cheltenham businesses, the faster site tends to get found first. And visitors are blunter than Google: research consistently shows people abandon pages that take more than a few seconds. A slow site doesn’t feel slow to its owner — they visit it daily and it’s cached. It feels slow to the new customer on 4G who’s never been there before. That’s exactly who Lighthouse simulates.
The three problems behind almost every bad score
- Giant images. Photo-heavy pages uploading camera-original images. The fix — modern formats and compression — usually costs nothing.
- Theme and plugin bloat. Page builders loading twenty scripts to render three paragraphs. This is the hardest to fix without a rebuild, and the reason we build sites without the bloat in the first place.
- Slow hosting. A quarter of the sites we tested wait over half a second for their server to start responding. No front-end fix can recover that — it’s a hosting problem.
Check your own site in 30 seconds
Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste your homepage address, and look at the mobile performance score. Over 90: you’re in the top tier locally. 50–89: fixable wins waiting. Under 50: your website is actively costing you customers, today.
Want to know exactly why yours scores what it does?
We’ll review any Cheltenham or Gloucestershire business website free of charge — what’s slowing it down, what it would take to fix, and whether it’s worth doing. No obligation, and if your site’s already quick we’ll happily tell you so. Ask for your free review or read how speed converts into sales.