Most contractor sites are slow on phones because they were built on a desktop, checked on a desktop, and then handed a 3 MB hero photo, a page builder and a dozen plugins. Google's line is 2.5 seconds to the first real content on a phone. Past about 4 seconds, a measurable share of homeowners leave and call the next name.
You can check your own site in 60 seconds, below.
The line Google draws: 2.5 seconds
Google measures how long a page takes to show its biggest piece of content on the screen, usually the headline or the main photo. It calls that Largest Contentful Paint. The targets are public: 2.5 seconds or less is good, over 4 seconds is poor, and the gap between is "needs improvement".1 Those numbers are for a phone on a mid-range connection, not a laptop on office Wi-Fi, which is why a site can feel instant at your desk and still fail.
The test is run on a phone, so run yours on a phone.
The same numbers feed Google's page experience signals, which is part of how it decides which of two similar local sites goes first.2 A slow site is not banned from search. It is simply beaten, over and over, by the faster one next door.
What a slow load costs
Google's own study of mobile pages found that 53% of visits were abandoned when a page took longer than 3 seconds to load.3 That figure is from 2016 and phones have improved since; so have page sizes, which is why so many of the contractor sites we audit still miss Google's 4-second "poor" line. The share per trade is published monthly in the data section.
Here is how we turn that into jobs in the free audit, with every assumption on the page. Take a roofing company with a site that shows its first real content at 6.5 seconds:
| Assumption | Value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Visits a month | 500 | Assumed for a small local site; your analytics replace it |
| On a phone | 65% | Assumed; most local service searches are on phones |
| Phone visitors lost at a 6.5 s load | 15% | Our banded estimate: 0% under 2.5 s, 5% to 4 s, 10% to 6 s, 15% to 10 s |
| Visits that become a lead | 3% | Assumed |
| Leads that become a job | 25% | Assumed; your close rate replaces it |
| Roof replacement | $9,600 | Category figure, not this company's books |
500 visits x 65% on a phone x 15% lost x 3% x 25% x $9,600 is about $350 a month, or four to five roof replacements a year, from the speed problem alone. It is a scenario, not a prediction, and that is exactly how the audit labels it. The point is the shape: the loss is small per visit and it never stops.
Every free audit runs the site through Google's PageSpeed test on the phone setting, takes a real 390 x 844 phone screenshot, and compares the load time with the nearby competitors we can find and measure. The monthly numbers across all of those sites, per trade, are in the data section; how they are produced is on the method page.
The five usual causes
1. The hero photo
A 4,000-pixel photo from a phone camera, uploaded as-is, is 3 to 6 MB. On a phone it is shown 390 pixels wide. The browser downloads all of it anyway, and that download is the Largest Contentful Paint. Resized to the width it is shown at and saved as a modern format, the same photo is 60 to 120 KB. This one fix moves more contractor sites under 2.5 seconds than anything else we do.
2. The page builder
Drag-and-drop builders (the ones inside WordPress, and the hosted ones) ship their whole toolkit with every page: the styles and scripts for every widget you did not use. The phone has to download and run that before it can draw your headline. The site is not slow because it is WordPress; it is slow because of what was bolted onto it. Our short answer on WordPress goes through that.
3. Plugins and widgets
A review widget, a chat bubble, a form plugin, a cookie banner, two tracking tags and a slider each add a request or ten. On a phone on a cell signal, each round trip costs. Twelve of them in a row cost seconds.
4. Fonts
Two or three custom typefaces, each in four weights, loaded before the text is allowed to show. The homeowner stares at a blank page while the font arrives. Modern sites load one family, show the text immediately in a system font, and swap when the file lands.
5. Third-party scripts
Ad pixels, heat-map tools, a call-tracking script from three vendors ago. Each runs on the phone's processor before the page is usable. Most contractor sites we audit carry scripts for services the owner stopped paying for.
Test your own site in 60 seconds
- Open pagespeed.web.dev on any device.
- Paste your homepage address and press Analyze.
- Stay on the Mobile tab. That is the one that matters.
- Read two things: the Performance score out of 100 and the Largest Contentful Paint time underneath it. Under 2.5 s is where you want to be. If it says 5.8 s, that is what a homeowner on a cell signal waits.
- Run your two nearest competitors the same way. If they are faster, that is the gap the audit was written to close.
The number moves a little between runs; that is normal. The band it sits in does not. The one-minute test page has screenshots of what to look for.
What a rebuild changes, and what it cannot
A site built for the phone first is a different object. Ours are written as plain pages: the styles ship inside the page, one font, every image resized and lazy-loaded, no page builder, no plugin layer, served from a network with a copy near the homeowner. The roofing demo, the HVAC demo and the plumbing demo are built that way; open one on your phone and time it.
What it cannot do: make up for a slow server you insist on keeping, or for a 30-second video you want to autoplay on the first screen. It also does not win the call by itself. Speed gets the homeowner to the first screen; what is on that screen gets the call.
That is why the speed promise on our engines is written the way it is: mobile performance 90 or better and main content under 2.5 seconds at launch, or no monthly fee until it is. It is measurable, so we put it in writing. Pricing is on the cost guide.
Questions contractors ask about speed
My site loads fast for me. Why does the test say 6 seconds?
You are on Wi-Fi, on a computer that has already cached the site, probably on a new machine. The test runs on a simulated mid-range phone on a throttled connection, which is what a homeowner in a driveway has. Both are real; the second one is the customer.
Does the Performance score or the seconds matter more?
The seconds. The score bundles several measurements; the Largest Contentful Paint time is the one a person feels and the one Google draws the 2.5-second line on. A site can score 70 and load its headline in 2 seconds; it can score 85 and take 4.
Will a faster host fix it?
Rarely on its own. Hosting is usually a few hundred milliseconds of the total. The megabytes of images, scripts and builder code are the seconds. Fix the page, then the host.
How fast are the demo sites?
Run them through the same test; they are built to land under 2.5 seconds on the mobile tab with a 90+ performance score, and that is the standard every client site launches to.
Sources
- Google, web.dev: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): thresholds of 2.5 s (good) and 4.0 s (poor).
- Google Search Central: Understanding page experience in Google Search results.
- Google / Think with Google, 2016-2017: Find out how you stack up to new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed: 53% of mobile site visits abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds.
- Scenario assumptions (500 visits, 65% phone, loss bands, 3% visit-to-lead, 25% close, $9,600 roof replacement) are the ones printed in every Easy Design Agency audit; they are labeled as assumptions there too. Method: how we measure contractor websites.
See this on your own site.
The free audit measures your site on a real phone: load time, the first screen, the call button, what Google's AI says about you next to the competitors. Written, back within one business day. No call.