Why Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress Score Low on Google PageSpeed

If you have ever run your website through Google PageSpeed Insights and watched the score land in the orange or red, you probably felt a mix of confusion and mild dread. Words like "Largest Contentful Paint" and "Total Blocking Time" appear, and suddenly you are staring at a wall of technical jargon that was never part of your plan when you signed up for a website builder.

According to DebugBear's 2025 study of real Lighthouse data, the average mobile PageSpeed scores for the most popular website builders are: Wix at 72, WordPress at 34, and Squarespace at 31. These are not outliers — they are the averages across thousands of live sites.

Here is the plain-English version of what that PageSpeed score means, why website builders consistently score this low, and why it genuinely affects your business — not just your anxiety about website metrics.

What Google PageSpeed Actually Measures

PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google that analyzes how fast and smooth your website feels to a real visitor. It does not just measure raw load time. It measures the experience — how quickly something useful appears on screen, whether the page shifts around while loading, and how long before a visitor can actually click a button without the page ignoring them.

The score is built from a group of measurements Google calls Core Web Vitals. The three that matter most are:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

How long it takes for the main content — usually your hero image or headline — to appear on screen. Google wants this under 2.5 seconds. On a typical Wix site, LCP often lands between 3 and 6 seconds on mobile.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Whether elements jump around as the page loads. Ever tried to tap a button on your phone and it moved just as you tapped it? That is a high CLS score. Website builders are particularly prone to this because of all the asynchronous scripts loading in.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

How quickly the page responds when someone clicks or taps something. Heavy JavaScript frameworks — the kind Wix and Squarespace rely on — often block the main thread, making the page feel sluggish even after it looks loaded.

A score of 95–100 means all three are in excellent shape. A score in the 30s or 40s — where Squarespace and WordPress typically land — means at least some of them are failing, often badly.

Why This Score Affects Your Google Rankings

This is where it stops being abstract. Since 2021, Google has officially included Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. That means two websites competing for the same local search term — say, "dentist in Austin" or "coffee shop near downtown Raleigh" — will not rank equally if one loads fast and one does not.

Google's reasoning is straightforward: they want to send their users to pages that provide a good experience. A slow, janky site frustrates users, and Google tracks that behavior through Chrome field data. If visitors land on your page and leave quickly, those poor engagement signals reflect badly on your page — even if your content is excellent.

The practical consequence is real. A one-point improvement in your PageSpeed score is not going to transform your rankings overnight. But scoring 31 (Squarespace) or 34 (WordPress) versus 95–100 is a meaningful structural disadvantage in competitive local search, compounded over months and years.

Why Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress Sites Score Low

This is not a criticism of these platforms as products. Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress are genuinely useful tools that let non-developers put a professional-looking site online without hiring anyone. But the architecture that makes them easy to use is the same architecture that makes them slow.

They run on heavy JavaScript frameworks. When a visitor loads a Wix or Squarespace page, their browser does not just download your content. It downloads an entire application platform — the editor engine, the rendering layer, all the infrastructure that makes drag-and-drop editing possible. Your visitor never uses that editor. They are just reading your hours of operation and looking for your phone number. But their device still has to process all of it before your page becomes usable. WordPress has a different problem: themes and plugins pile up JavaScript and CSS that the page does not need, and the database-driven architecture adds server-side latency.

They load third-party scripts you did not ask for. Analytics, advertising pixels, live chat widgets, cookie consent tools, font loaders — every integration adds a request, and every request adds time. All three platforms include several of these by default. Some you opted into, some you did not. Each one has to complete before the browser can finish rendering your page.

Images are often not optimized at the source. Website builders will compress images to a degree, but they serve them in ways that are not always efficient for every device. A visitor on a mobile phone with a mid-range connection is often downloading imagery sized for a 1440-pixel desktop monitor.

The server response itself carries overhead. Wix and Squarespace use dynamic server-side rendering, which means every page visit triggers a process on their servers to assemble your page before sending it. WordPress queries a database on every request unless you add caching plugins. This adds latency before a single byte reaches your visitor's browser.

None of this is fixable from within the platform's interface. It is baked into the architecture.

What a Low PageSpeed Score Actually Costs You

Beyond rankings, there is a direct conversion cost to slow websites that independent research has documented consistently.

Research from Google and SOASTA found that as mobile page load time increases from one second to three seconds, the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by 32 percent. At five seconds, that probability jumps to 90 percent. Separately, in a case study cited by Google on web.dev, the BBC reported losing an additional 10% of users for every extra second their site took to load.

For a local business website, the math is simple. If someone searches for your service, finds your site, and leaves before it finishes loading — they go to your competitor. They do not wait. They do not come back. That is a customer you paid for with your time, your Google Business Profile effort, your word-of-mouth reputation, or your ad spend, and they left before they even read your first sentence.

A mobile visitor searching "emergency plumber near me" at 9pm is not going to wait four seconds for your homepage to finish loading its JavaScript bundle. They are going to tap the next result.

What 95–100 Looks Like in Practice

Sites that score in the 95–100 range are built differently from the ground up. They serve clean, minimal HTML and CSS with no platform overhead. Images are properly sized, compressed, and served in modern formats. There are no unnecessary third-party scripts running before the page is usable. The server delivers a complete, pre-built page instantly, with nothing to assemble at request time.

This is how hand-coded static sites work by design. Every site is a self-contained HTML file — no WordPress, no Wix, no framework. Just clean code that browsers can render immediately.

That is not a feature bolted on after the fact. It is a consequence of how the sites are built.

The Honest Bottom Line

A low PageSpeed score is not a catastrophe, and fixing it will not instantly triple your leads. But scoring 31 or 72 when your competitor scores 95 is a real, measurable disadvantage in search — and it represents a portion of potential customers who are leaving your site before they can become actual customers.

If you are investing in local SEO, running Google Ads, or asking customers to find your local business website online, the performance of that site is part of the investment working or not working. A slow site leaks value from every other effort you make to get found.

The good news is that this is a solvable problem. It does not require a complicated technical overhaul or an ongoing monthly subscription. It requires a site built correctly in the first place.

How to Check Your Own Score

It takes 30 seconds:

1. Go to pagespeed.web.dev
2. Paste your website URL
3. Make sure "Mobile" is selected (Google uses mobile-first indexing, so this is the score that matters for your rankings)
4. Click "Analyze" and wait for the results

Look at the number in the circle at the top. Green (90–100) means you are in good shape. Orange (50–89) means there is room for improvement. Red (0–49) means your site is actively hurting your search performance and losing visitors.

If you are on Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress and the score is below 75, there is not much you can do within the platform to fix it. You can reduce the number of apps and plugins, compress images before uploading, and remove unnecessary widgets — but the core performance ceiling is set by the platform itself. The editor infrastructure and heavy frameworks load for every single visitor regardless of what you change in your dashboard.

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Stefan Gabos is a senior web developer with 15+ years of experience building fast, accessible websites. He runs PageDrop — affordable one-page websites for small businesses, built with clean code and no monthly fees.