ITPLUS●
Website speed review · 23 October 2026 · Skip to the plan

itplus.co.nz — measured, not guessed

Your shop makes customers wait 2–3 seconds before it even starts to appear.

We tested your homepage, your product categories and your About page from Auckland. Nothing is broken — every page loads. But the site is heavy and slow to start: the homepage pulls 45 MB of images on a first visit, and category pages take 10 MB. On a phone, that is the difference between a browser and a back button.

The good news: this is configuration and image weight, not a rebuild. Same design, same products, dramatically less waiting. It is about a week of work, not a few months — and it is cheapest done as one job rather than three.

See the plan and price See the measurements

Tested 23 Oct 2026 from Auckland, plus a full browser load test. Google's free speed tool was unavailable that day, so every number here is our own measurement.

The numbers, in plain English

Fast enough is not a feeling. It is four measurable things.

Google publishes the thresholds it uses to judge a shop like yours. We measured the same things on your site, on a first visit (no saved files), which is what every new customer gets.

Time before the page startsAuckland visitor, cold
Yours 2.3–3.3 s
Target 0.8 s
4× too slowEvery page waits on the server before showing anything.
Homepage, first visitDownloads before it is complete
Yours 45 MB
Target ~2 MB
20× too heavy179 separate files, the biggest ones are menu banners.
Product category pageFirst visit
Yours 10.8 MB
Target ~2 MB
5× too heavyProduct photos are saved in a format meant for logos, not photographs.
Content jumping while it loadsGoogle "layout stability" score
Yours 0.43
Target 0.1
Rated "poor"Photos push the layout around as they arrive — easy to mis-tap on a phone.

Where the homepage's 45 MB actually goes

26 menu banners — ~38 MB Product photos — ~2.6 MB Everything else — ~5 MB

Most of that weight is invisible until someone hovers the brands menu — yet every visitor downloads it anyway. The largest single banner is 2.8 MB (2340×840 pixels) and we counted 26 of them.

What slow is worth

A second of waiting is not a technical detail. It is a customer who never sees your price.

Google's own mobile research found that 53% of visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds. Your category pages are in that zone before the first product photo has even arrived.

From Google Analytics, or your best guess.
NZD, before GST.
Percent. Online shops typically sit near 1–2%.
How many more visitors stick around and buy.
$1,400
extra sales per month, if the site stops losing people
Extra orders per month4
Your selected plan, one-off$600–$1,020
Paid back inabout 3 weeks
This is arithmetic on the numbers you typed, not a promise. We pre-filled rough starting values — replace them with your real ones and the result updates.

The fix plan

Do the whole list in one pass. It is the cheapest way to buy it.

We recommend all eight, and everything below is ticked by default. These are not eight separate projects — they are one job on the same pages with one test cycle. Priced at $60/hour in deliberately wide ranges, and billed in three stages so cash flow is never the reason to go smaller.

Why the full list

Three separate jobs cost more than one.

Every partial job still needs the same setup, the same staging checks and the same real test orders through checkout. Split this into three engagements and you pay for that roughly three times — an estimated 6–9 extra hours ($360–$540) for work that does not make the site any faster.

  • They only work together. Caching alone still ships a 45 MB homepage. Shrinking images alone still waits 2–3 seconds for the server. Script cleanup without the edge still pays 229 ms across ~180 files.
  • One test cycle, one report. Real test orders, before/after numbers and sign-off happen once, not at the end of every stage.
  • Nothing left half-fixed. The two items people skip — layout stability and the /shop/ dead end — are exactly the ones customers feel and Google scores.
  • Billed in three stages. Full scope, three invoices: after caching, after the image work, on sign-off.

Everything, one pass

8 fixes selected · Everything, one pass

$1,860–$3,120+GST
31–52 hours
about 6–9 working days

Estimates in NZD, excluding GST, at $60/hour. The ranges are padded on purpose: the top end covers the usual surprises — plugin conflicts, a theme update landing mid-job, a host that fights back. Work to the actual hours, not the top of the range; the price is confirmed after a 15-minute look at your plugins and server.

How it would run

Three steps, no surprises.

STEP 01

Free baseline

We re-measure the same three pages on the day we start, agree the numbers, and send you a one-page before. That is the scoreboard for everything after.

STEP 02

Fix in stages

Each stage is quoted and approved before we start, done in a quiet trading window, then checked: product pages, add to cart, and a real test order through checkout.

STEP 03

Show the result

The same test, the same way, with the numbers side by side. If something did not move, we say so plainly rather than quietly leaving it out.

Questions a business owner should ask

The honest answers.

Will my website look any different?

No. The design, colours, layout and products stay exactly as they are. Images are re-saved in a smaller file format, which is invisible to a visitor except that they appear faster. If any image looked softer after conversion, we would keep the original for that one.

Could this break my shop or my checkout?

Caching is the one change that can upset a cart if it is configured carelessly, so it is configured to exclude the cart, checkout and account pages. After each stage we place real test orders through the checkout and check them in the backend before calling the stage done. Where your hosting offers a staging copy, riskier theme changes are done there first.

Do I need to move to a new hosting company?

Not necessarily. Most of the problem is configuration and image weight, not the host. Putting Cloudflare in front closes the distance gap cheaply on the free plan. If, after the fixes, the server itself is still the bottleneck, we will show you the measurement that proves it and price a move separately — we would rather show you than sell you.

How long until it is done?

The full list is roughly 6–9 working days; the speed essentials alone are about 3–4. We usually start within a week and work outside your busy hours, so the shop stays open the whole time. Ranges are wide because a plugin conflict can eat half a day — that is priced in, not billed as a surprise.

How will I know it actually worked?

Because we measure the same four things before and after, the same way, and send you the table. "Time before the page starts" should fall from 2–3 seconds to under half a second, and the homepage should go from 45 MB to a few megabytes. Those are hard numbers, not a feeling.

What does it cost to keep it fast?

Nothing ongoing is required. Cloudflare's plan we would use is free, and the caching tool is already installed on your site. If you want a monthly check — we re-measure, clear out any new oversized images and send a short note — that is one hour a month at $60.

Why is the homepage so heavy in the first place?

It grew one banner at a time. Each brand banner was uploaded as a print-quality image, which is the right choice for a catalogue and the wrong one for a web page. Twenty-six of them sit in the menu, and the site loads all of them for every visitor whether they open the menu or not. It is a common problem and a quick one to fix.

8 fixes selected $1,860–$3,120+GST 31–52 hours