You spent $500 on ads this month. One hundred people clicked. Each dot below is one of them, standing on your homepage right now, waiting for it to load.

Here's what happens while they wait.

LIVE · 100 PAID VISITORS READY
100
STILL THERE
0.0s
LOADING
$500
ALREADY SPENT
EACH SQUARE IS ONE PERSON YOU PAID FOR

PAGE TAKES 8 SECONDS

17

people still there. You paid for 100.

PAGE TAKES 1 SECOND

~90

people still there. Same 100 clicks, same money.

Where they went

Nobody made a decision about your company. They didn't read your reviews and pick someone else. They tapped, saw a white screen, and went back to the search results — which still had four other contractors on it.

1 sec100
2 sec87
3 sec68
4 sec47
6 sec24
8 sec17
The brutal part: you already paid for all 100. The 83 who left cost exactly the same as the 17 who stayed.

What this costs in real money

At $5 a click, those 100 visitors cost $500. If 17 of them see your page and 3 call you, that's $167 per call.

Fix the page so 90 arrive instead of 17, and the same $500 gets you around 7 calls. That's $71 per call — and four extra jobs a month you didn't spend another dollar to get.

Why contractor sites are the worst offenders

I measured 100 of them last week. The median homepage weighed 2 MB. Thirty percent took over three seconds. One weighed 19 megabytes because somebody uploaded three photos straight from a phone as PNG files.

None of those owners knew. Their sites load fine on the office wifi, on a desktop, with everything cached. The customer standing in a driveway on one bar of LTE has a completely different experience — and that customer is the one holding the credit card.

Check yours right now

  • Open your site on your phone with wifi turned off
  • Count out loud until you can tap something
  • If you got past three — you're losing half the people you pay for

That's the whole test. No tools, no consultant, thirty seconds.