How fast should your website load? Under 3 seconds on a phone, and the closer to 1 second the better. Google found that 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load (Google/SOASTA, 2017). Most contractor websites we audit take far longer than that. That is not a tech problem. It is a leak in your lead flow, and it costs more than the website did.

What is website speed, and what counts as a good load time?

Website speed is how long a page takes to load and respond on a real device. Google measures it with Core Web Vitals, three numbers pulled from real user data in the Chrome User Experience Report. A good website load time for a service business is under 2.5 seconds for the main content to appear, and the page should react to a tap in under 200 milliseconds. Anything past 3 seconds on a phone is losing you calls.

Here is the scenario we see almost every week. A roofer signs up with us. He is proud of his site. It looks great on the 27-inch monitor in his office. Then we open it on a phone on a normal cell connection and count. Four seconds. Six seconds. The hero image is still loading at eight. He has been paying for Google Ads that send people to a page half of them never see.

How fast do people actually leave a slow website?

Fast. The drop-off starts in the first second and gets steep by the third. Here is the sourced data, so you can see the shape of the curve.

Put those together and the math is ugly for a slow contractor site. If 100 people click your ad and your page takes 5 seconds, roughly half never see it. Of the half who stay, you convert a chunk less than you would at 2 seconds. You paid for all 100 clicks. See the full breakdown in funnel math: what 100 website visitors really turn into.

What does a slow website cost a contractor in real money?

Say you spend $2,000 a month on Google Ads at about $20 a click. That is 100 visitors. At a 2 second load time, a decent contractor site turns 4 or 5 of them into leads. At 5 seconds, using the drop-off data above, you might see 2. If your average job is $1,500 and you close half your leads, the slow site is costing you roughly $2,000 a month in jobs you already paid to attract. Every month. That is why we tell owners the slow website is more expensive than the new one.

And it compounds. Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, so a slow site also loses free traffic from local search. Slow pages get fewer calls from the traffic they do get. Fewer calls means fewer reviews. Fewer reviews means lower Maps rankings. One slow page quietly pulls on the whole system.

Why are most contractor websites so slow?

In our experience across thousands of home service sites, the same five things show up in the speed test results over and over.

1. Giant images. A 6 MB photo of a truck, uploaded straight from a phone. The browser has to pull the whole file before it paints the page.
2. Cheap hosting. Server response time, also called time to first byte, is over a second before the page even starts. A $4 a month shared host is slow at 6pm when everyone is online.
3. Plugin and script bloat. Chat widgets, pop-ups, tracking pixels, sliders, and fonts, each loading its own CSS files and JavaScript. Ten small delays add up to one long one.
4. No browser caching or content delivery network. Every visit rebuilds every file from scratch, from one server that may be across the country.
5. Layout jumping. Buttons move as ads and images load, which Google measures as cumulative layout shift. The visitor taps the wrong thing, or gives up.

How do I check the speed of my website for free?

Use Google PageSpeed Insights. Go to the free website speed test, enter your homepage address, and run it for mobile first. You get two kinds of numbers. Lab data is a simulated run on a slow phone. Real user data, when Google has enough of it, shows what actual visitors saw over the last 28 days. Trust the real user data when it exists.

Look at three things in the test results: Largest Contentful Paint (when the main content appears, aim under 2.5 seconds), Interaction to Next Paint (how fast the page reacts to a tap, aim under 200 ms), and cumulative layout shift (aim under 0.1). Google's Core Web Vitals report inside Search Console tracks these for every page. A Pingdom website speed test or GTmetrix run gives a second opinion with a waterfall of every file so you can see which one is slow.

Test your service pages too, not just the homepage. Your ads and local search results often land people on inner pages. Our 10-minute contractor website checkup walks through this with the other four checks that matter.

How do I speed up my website load time?

Work from biggest win to smallest. Most sites get from slow to good with the first three.

Our own build standard is a fast loading website by default: compressed images, a global content delivery network, and no plugin pile. When we rebuild a slow site, the speed change is usually the first thing the owner notices, and the phone ringing more is the second. If you want to know what else a site needs beyond speed, read your website is a salesperson, not a brochure.

Quick answers about website speed

How long should it take for a website to load?

Under 3 seconds on mobile is the floor. Under 2 seconds is the goal. Google's Core Web Vitals call 2.5 seconds "good" for the main content to appear.

Does website speed affect SEO rankings?

Yes. Page speed and Core Web Vitals are a confirmed ranking factor. It is a small factor next to content and reviews, but a slow site also loses the visitors who do arrive, which hurts every other metric Google watches.

Is a speed score of 75 good?

A PageSpeed score of 75 on mobile is fine for most local businesses. The score matters less than the three Core Web Vitals passing. A site can score 60 and still convert well if the main content appears fast and the call button works on the first tap.

Why does my site feel fast to me but slow to customers?

You are on office Wi-Fi with the site cached in your browser. Customers are on a phone, on cell data, visiting for the first time. Always test in the speed test tool with mobile selected, or on your own phone with Wi-Fi off.

Can a slow website make my Google Ads cost more?

Yes. Landing page experience is part of Quality Score. Slow pages lower it, which raises your cost per click and lowers your ad position. You pay more for the click and lose the visitor after.

Related reading: how website design impacts mobile experience, common website design mistakes, and why 97% of visitors leave without calling.