How fast are business websites in Cyprus?
- 8.9 smedian load time on a phone
- 4 %load in 2.5 seconds or less
- 1,031business websites in four cities
The typical business website in Cyprus takes 8.9 seconds to show its main content on a phone. That is the median of 1,031 websites we tested in October 2026. Google calls 2.5 seconds or less good. 42 of the 1,031 reach that, which is 4 %. 86 % take longer than 4 seconds.
We tested the home page of established businesses in Paphos, Limassol, Nicosia and Larnaca: hotels, clinics, salons, gyms, law firms, estate agents and more (how we tested).
How long do business websites in Cyprus take to load?
Slow. Half of them need 8.9 seconds or longer on a phone, and one in four needs more than 14.6 seconds.
Load time here means the moment the largest picture or block of text on the screen is visible. Google rates it in three steps: good up to 2.5 seconds, poor above 4 seconds, and a middle zone between. The 1,031 websites fall like this:
- 42 are good: 2.5 seconds or less
- 105 are in the middle: up to 4 seconds
- 884 are poor: longer than 4 seconds
Of those 884, 447 take longer than 10 seconds and 123 longer than 20.
The test also gives every page a speed score from 0 to 100. The median is 57. Google calls 90 or more good: 55 websites reach it. 355 score below 50, which Google calls poor.
Which city has the fastest websites?
Larnaca, with a median of 7.7 seconds. Paphos is the slowest with 10.0 seconds. No city is fast: in each of the four, at least 84 % of the websites take longer than 4 seconds.
| City | Websites | Median load time | 2.5 s or less | Over 4 s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Larnaca | 207 | 7.7 s | 2 % | 86 % |
| Nicosia | 245 | 8.5 s | 4 % | 87 % |
| Limassol | 335 | 9.3 s | 5 % | 84 % |
| Paphos | 239 | 10.0 s | 5 % | 86 % |
The difference between the cities is small next to the distance to 2.5 seconds.
Which industries have the slowest websites?
Weddings and events, with a median of 12.3 seconds, and hotels with 11.2. The fastest group is car rental, diving and boat tours with 6.5 seconds, still far from good.
| Industry | Websites | Median load time | 2.5 s or less | Over 4 s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Car rental, diving and boat tours | 99 | 6.5 s | 5 % | 81 % |
| Vets and physiotherapists | 51 | 7.5 s | 6 % | 88 % |
| Law and accounting firms | 141 | 8.3 s | 6 % | 83 % |
| Hair, barber and beauty salons | 73 | 8.3 s | 3 % | 82 % |
| Car dealers and furniture stores | 67 | 8.5 s | 3 % | 90 % |
| Dental and skin clinics | 78 | 8.6 s | 5 % | 90 % |
| Property and construction | 216 | 9.3 s | 5 % | 85 % |
| Gyms and classes | 68 | 9.9 s | 6 % | 82 % |
| Hotels | 142 | 11.2 s | 2 % | 88 % |
| Weddings and events | 42 | 12.3 s | 2 % | 95 % |
The slow groups have something in common. Hotels and wedding businesses sell with pictures, and their home pages carry many large ones.
Why are these websites slow?
Mostly because of their weight. A typical home page in our test weighs 2.9 MB. Pages under 1 MB show their content after 3.8 seconds at the median, pages between 2 and 4 MB after 10.2 seconds.
| Weight of the home page | Websites | Median load time | 2.5 s or less | Over 4 s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 MB | 136 | 3.8 s | 20 % | 46 % |
| 1 to 2 MB | 184 | 7.4 s | 3 % | 87 % |
| 2 to 4 MB | 335 | 10.2 s | 2 % | 93 % |
| 4 to 8 MB | 198 | 14.7 s | 2 % | 92 % |
| 8 MB and more | 178 | 12.4 s | 0 % | 93 % |
Weight is pictures, videos, fonts and program code. Only 136 of the 1,031 home pages stay under 1 MB, and they are the only group in which a real share is fast: one in five.
A light page is not fast by itself. Almost half of the light ones still take longer than 4 seconds. But a heavy page is almost never fast: of the 711 home pages with 2 MB or more, 10 are.
Does it matter which system the website is built with?
Not much. WordPress, Wix and Squarespace websites are all slow at the median. We could recognise the system on about two in three websites.
| System | Websites | Median load time | 2.5 s or less | Over 4 s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 516 | 9.4 s | 3 % | 88 % |
| Wix | 73 | 9.1 s | 0 % | 96 % |
| Squarespace | 17 | 17.3 s | 0 % | 100 % |
| Other or not recognised | 425 | 8.0 s | 6 % | 81 % |
The 17 Squarespace websites are too few to judge a product. And a system does not make a website slow by itself: 16 of the 516 WordPress websites are fast. What the builder puts on the page decides.
Does a slow website cost you customers?
Our test cannot count that. It measures seconds, not lost enquiries. What we can say is how people choose.
Your customer opens three websites, compares, and picks one. Most of them do it on a phone, often on mobile data. A website that is still white after five seconds is not part of the comparison. The other two are.
And the bar is low. If 86 % of the business websites around you take longer than 4 seconds, a website that needs 2 is among the fastest in your town.
How can you test your own website?
Open PageSpeed Insights, Google's free test, enter your address and look at the result for mobile. It takes about a minute.
- Look at Largest Contentful Paint. That is the load time used in this article. Up to 2.5 seconds is good.
- Look at the performance score. 90 or more is good, below 50 is poor.
- Scroll to the list of what to fix. Oversized pictures are usually at the top.
Run it twice. The numbers move a little from one run to the next.
What makes a website fast?
Less to download. The data above points to three things, in this order:
- Smaller pictures. A photo straight from a camera has several megabytes. Sized for a phone and saved in a modern format it needs a fraction of that.
- No video that starts by itself at the top of the home page.
- Fewer add-ons. Every slider, chat window and tracking tool is code the phone has to load before it shows anything.
If your website is built with a page builder and many plug-ins, repairs help only up to a point. After that, a rebuild is usually the shorter way.
How fast is our own website?
Our home page scores 91 to 95 in PageSpeed Insights for phones and shows its main content after 2.5 to 3.1 seconds, depending on the run. On a good run that is Google's 2.5 seconds, on others a little above it.
We build every website by hand, without templates and page builders, and speed is part of the work from the first day. See our web design offer, the pages for Paphos and Limassol, or read what a website costs in Cyprus.
How did we test?
We tested the home page of 1,233 established businesses on 2 October 2026 with Lighthouse, the test from Google that also runs inside PageSpeed Insights. 1,031 results are counted here.
- We took the businesses from Google Maps in Paphos, Limassol, Nicosia and Larnaca: twelve industry groups, each business with a website of its own and enough reviews to count as established.
- 65 addresses did not answer, and 61 gave no result.
- For 76 websites the test was shown a protection page of the server and not the website itself. We left those out, because they say nothing about the website.
- That leaves 1,031 home pages.
The test loads each page the way a mid-range phone on a slow mobile connection would: 1.6 megabits per second and a slowed-down processor. Median means that half of the websites are faster and half are slower.
What the numbers cannot show:
- This is a test in a lab, one run for each website. It is not what every real visitor sees. On fast wifi and a new phone, the same pages load quicker.
- The test did not run from Cyprus. A website on a server in Cyprus may load a little faster for a visitor here than it did for the test.
- Only the home page was tested, not booking pages or galleries.
- Small and new businesses are missing. The list holds businesses with a website and a number of Google reviews.