How fast should a contractor website load?

Speed is a sales problem

Most people looking for a contractor are on a phone, often on a cellular connection, often standing in the yard looking at the problem. If your homepage is slow, they don't wait. They hit "back" and tap the next company.

Google's research found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load (Marketing Dive). Every second your homepage takes is a chance to lose a call you already paid to get, through ads, your Google profile or word of mouth.

What "fast" means, in numbers

Google measures loading with a metric called Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long it takes for the biggest thing on the screen, usually your main photo or headline, to appear. Google considers 2.5 seconds or less "good" (web.dev).

Speed is also part of what Google calls page experience. Good page experience can help in search, but it doesn't replace relevant, useful content (Google Search Central). Think of speed as removing a handicap, not as a magic ranking switch.

How to test your own site

1. Go to Google's PageSpeed Insights and enter your homepage.
2. Look at the mobile results, not desktop.
3. Note your performance score and your Largest Contentful Paint.
4. Scroll down to the list of opportunities. That's what's slowing you down.

Run it two or three times. Results vary a little between tests, so look at the pattern, not a single number.

The usual culprits on contractor sites

After testing a lot of contractor homepages, the same problems come up again and again:

• Photos straight from a phone. A single modern phone photo can be several megabytes. Put five of them in a slider and a visitor on 4G may be downloading 15–25 MB before they see your phone number.
• Sliders and carousels. They load every slide up front, even the ones nobody sees.
• Plugins added over the years. Each one can add code to every page, whether that page uses it or not.
• Chat widgets, trackers and embeds. Social feeds, map embeds and chat bubbles often load large scripts from other companies.
• Cheap or overloaded hosting. If the server takes a long time to respond, nothing else can start.

The fixes that make the biggest difference

In rough order of impact for a typical contractor site:

1. Compress and resize photos. Convert them to WebP and size them for phones. This alone often cuts page weight dramatically.
2. Load photos lower on the page only when needed (lazy loading), and make sure your top photo loads first.
3. Remove what you don't use. Old plugins, sliders and widgets you've forgotten about.
4. Delay non-essential scripts like chat and tracking until after the page shows.
5. Turn on caching and compression, or move to better hosting if the server is the bottleneck.
6. Re-test with the same tool and compare before and after.

What you can do yourself this afternoon

You don't need a developer for the biggest win. If your site runs on WordPress:

• Find your three heaviest photos. In PageSpeed Insights, the "Avoid enormous network payloads" or similar section lists the largest files. Photos are usually at the top.
• Resize before uploading. A photo for a phone screen rarely needs to be wider than about 1,600 pixels. Most phones shoot four times that.
• Install one image-optimization plugin and run its bulk compression on your media library. Use one, not three; overlapping plugins slow things down.
• Delete plugins you don't use. Deactivate first, check the site still works, then delete.
• Remove the homepage slider if you have one. A single strong photo with your headline and phone number almost always works better on a phone anyway.

Then run PageSpeed Insights again and compare.

When a speed fix isn't enough

Sometimes the problem is the whole site: an old theme loaded with features you never use, a page builder version that's years out of date, or a design that was never made for phones. In that case, speed fixes help a little, but a rebuild on a lighter setup usually helps more, and it fixes the design and conversion problems at the same time.

A simple test: if your homepage still looks dated after it loads, or a visitor can't find your phone number in a few seconds, you have more than a speed problem. That's when a website redesign is worth comparing against a speed fix.

What not to worry about

You don't need a perfect 100. A clear page that shows your service, phone number and quote button in under about 2.5 seconds on a phone does the job. Chasing the last few points rarely brings in more calls.

Get a speed fix plan

If you'd like someone to do the testing and tell you exactly what's slowing your site down, our free speed fix plan runs Google's mobile test on your homepage and sends a plain-English list of fixes. If you want them done for you, that's our Website Speed Fix.