Why Veterinary Websites Are Slow

Borah Labs' 2026 scan of veterinary websites found an average Largest Contentful Paint of 9.31 seconds — roughly four times Google's 2.5-second threshold — and only 5.2% of sites scoring 90 or above on PageSpeed.

Largest Contentful Paint, veterinary sector average. Borah Labs, 2026.

How bad it actually is

Nine seconds is a long time. It is long enough to go back to the search results and open the next practice, which is exactly what a meaningful share of people do. And because CUFinder put veterinary mobile traffic at 72.4% in 2026, most of those nine seconds are being endured on a phone rather than on the fast office connection where the site was signed off.

Where the weight comes from

In our experience auditing these sites, it is almost always the same four things, in the same order.

1. Photographs straight off the camera. A 4MB hero image of a labrador, served at full resolution to a phone that will display it 390 pixels wide. This is usually more than half the page weight on its own.
2. A hero slideshow. Five large images, of which the visitor sees one. Slideshows also convert poorly — people rarely wait for slide two — so this is weight bought with no return.
3. Third-party scripts nobody audits. A chat widget, two analytics tags, a review carousel, a Facebook pixel, a booking embed and a cookie banner. Each is small. Together they are frequently larger than the actual page.
4. Web fonts, loaded badly. Four weights of two families, render-blocking, with no fallback — so the text is invisible until they arrive.

What slow costs you

Two things, one obvious and one not.

The obvious one is abandonment. The less obvious one is that Core Web Vitals are a ranking input, so a slow site is also a site that appears lower, which compounds — fewer people find it, and fewer of those who do stay.

The practice with the fast site does not just convert better. It is also higher up the page.

The fixes, in order of return

1. Resize and convert your images. Nothing on a clinic website needs to be wider than about 1,600 pixels. Serve WebP or AVIF. This routinely cuts page weight by 70% and is the single highest-return hour of work available.
2. Delete the slideshow. One strong image. The page gets faster and converts better at the same time.
3. Audit the third-party scripts. List every one, ask what it is for, and remove anything nobody has looked at in a year. Most practices find two or three they cannot account for.
4. Lazy-load everything below the fold. One attribute per image.
5. Self-host your fonts, or cut them to two weights. And always set font-display: swap so text renders immediately in a fallback.
6. Set explicit width and height on images. This stops the page jumping around as it loads, which is a separate Core Web Vital and a genuine irritation to the reader.

Notice that five of the six are things you can do without rebuilding anything.

Measuring it honestly

Test on a phone, on cellular data, not on the clinic wifi. Use PageSpeed Insights and read the field data section if it is available — that is real visitors rather than a lab simulation, and it is usually worse than the lab score and more truthful.

Set a page-weight budget and hold to it: under 1MB for the homepage is comfortably achievable for a veterinary site and a number worth writing into any build brief. If an agency has never been asked for one, that itself tells you something, which is why it is on the list in how to hire a veterinary website designer.

Questions we get asked