Last week I loaded 100 contractor websites on a phone connection and timed every one — HVAC, roofing, plumbing, solar, restoration. Not opinions about design. A stopwatch and a scale.

Thirty percent took longer than three seconds before anything was usable. The worst one weighed 19.2 megabytes and needed about 15 seconds. That's a real HVAC company in Philadelphia, still paying for ads today.

What I found

HOW HEAVY THEIR HOMEPAGES WERE 31 sites — under 1 MB 17 sites — 1 to 3 MB 15 sites — 3 to 5 MB 6 sites — over 5 MB (worst: 19.2 MB) 69 sites weighed in full · median 2.0 MB · a good page is under 1 MB

A page under 1 MB shows up almost instantly. Past 3 MB you're asking a homeowner standing in his driveway, on one bar of service, to wait. He won't. He'll hit back and call the next guy on the list.

The part that costs money

Say you spend $500 a month on Google Ads and it brings 100 people to your site. Nothing about your ads changes in this math — only the page they land on.

SAME $500 IN ADS · SAME 100 CLICKS SLOW PAGE 3 calls — $167 per call FAST PAGE 7 calls — $71 per call 4 extra jobs a month × $450 average ticket = $1,800 you didn't spend a dime more to get

Four jobs a month. At a $450 ticket that's $1,800. At an $8,000 system replacement it's a different conversation entirely. And you already paid for those clicks — they just landed somewhere that made people wait.

Check yours in 30 seconds

Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste your website address, pick Mobile. Free, no signup. Two numbers matter: how long until the page is usable, and total page weight.

  • Under 2 seconds — you're fine, spend your energy elsewhere
  • 2 to 4 seconds — you're leaking, worth fixing
  • Over 4 seconds — you're paying for clicks that never see your phone number

What's actually slowing it down

Nine times out of ten, it's photos. Somebody uploaded pictures straight off a phone, saved as PNG. That Philadelphia HVAC site had three images at 2.4, 2.7 and 2.3 MB. Each one should weigh under 150 KB. Same picture, same quality — just saved right.

You don't need a new website to fix most of this. You need somebody to resize your photos and turn off the plugins you stopped using in 2021.

The other two culprits: a cheap slow server — 24 of the 100 sites took over a second just to answer, before a single image started loading — and a pile of plugins each dragging in its own scripts.

What to actually do about it

In order of how much time it buys you per hour of work:

  1. Resize every photo on the homepage

    Nothing on a website needs to be wider than 1600 pixels. Save as JPEG or WebP, not PNG. Free tools like Squoosh do it in your browser. This alone usually cuts page weight in half.

  2. Delete plugins you don't use

    Open your WordPress admin and look. Most contractor sites I measured carry six to ten plugins nobody has touched in years, each loading its own scripts on every page.

  3. Check what your host charges you for

    If your server takes over a second to answer, no amount of image work fixes it. Decent hosting for a small business site runs $10–20 a month.

A homeowner comparing three roofing companies on his phone gives each one a couple of seconds. Website speed isn't a technical detail — it's whether you're in the running at all.

Answers to the questions I get asked

How fast should my site load?

Under 3 seconds on a phone. A properly built contractor site does it in about 1 second and weighs under 1 MB.

Do I need a whole new website?

Often no. Compress the photos, drop dead plugins, move to decent hosting. If the site is 10 years old and won't work on a phone, then yes — start over.

Does speed affect Google rankings?

Yes, and it now affects whether AI tools mention you at all. A page nothing can load fast is a page nothing recommends.

One more number from my measurements, because it surprised me: 90 of the 100 sites had no chat and no way to catch a lead after hours. That's a separate leak — and a bigger one than speed.