Primary research
How slowly contractor websites load on a phone
This is how long the biggest thing on the screen takes to finish appearing after somebody taps your link. It is the closest single number to what a customer means when they say a website felt slow. Google draws its own line at two and a half seconds and uses it as one of the things that decides who ranks where.
Think about when your site actually gets loaded. Somebody is standing in a wet basement, or looking at a ceiling stain, on cellular, on a phone that is three years old. Every second between the tap and the page is a second they can spend hitting the back button and calling the next name on the results page. And they do.
The number by trade
| Trade | How long sites take to load on a phone | Brands | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roofing | 7.88s | 126 / 130 | homepage, mobile emulation |
| Remodeling | 7.57s | 107 / 146 | homepage, mobile emulation |
| HVAC | 6.24s | 104 / 104 | homepage, mobile emulation |
So the spread runs from HVAC at 6.24s to roofing at 7.88s. Which trade you work in changes what "normal" looks like, so read your own trade's page rather than the combined number.
Roofing
Roofing is the slowest of the three trades, and the average is far worse than the typical site, which tells you a handful of them are catastrophic. Some roofing sites take upward of thirty seconds to finish loading. The cause is no mystery: roofing sells on photographs, and full-size drone shots get dropped straight onto the homepage at the size they came off the camera.
Full roofing breakdown for this metric
Remodeling
Remodeling lands between the other two, and the spread is wide for the same reason as roofing, since the gallery is the entire point of a remodeling site. This trade also has the largest share of sites we could not get a complete speed reading from, so read the figure against the number of sites actually measured rather than the whole trade.
Full remodeling breakdown for this metric
HVAC
HVAC is the quickest of the three and still takes more than twice as long as Google would like. Quicker here is a matter of having less to load rather than anybody building better. HVAC sites carry fewer heavy photographs than roofing or remodeling, so they start ahead, then spend the advantage on chat bubbles, booking widgets and financing calculators.
Check your own site in ten minutes
Search for Google PageSpeed Insights, paste your homepage address in, and read the Mobile tab only. The Desktop tab flatters everybody. If the loading time it shows starts with a number bigger than four, the cause is almost always one enormous photo nobody shrank, and that is an afternoon of work rather than a rebuild.
- What was measured
- How long the typical site takes for the biggest thing on the screen to finish appearing, measured on a phone.
- How we measured it
- We loaded each site the way a phone on a normal mobile connection would, timed how long the biggest thing on the screen took to appear, and took the middle result for each trade.
- The technical version, for anyone checking our work
- Lighthouse mobile run per brand, median of Largest Contentful Paint in seconds
- Sample
- 380 contractor brands. Roofing 130, remodeling 146, HVAC 104.
- Collection window
- 2026-05-10 to 2026-05-16
- Who ran it
- Fervor Studio, first-party capture. Nobody paid to be included or excluded.
How the sites were picked, captured and scored: the methodology. Every metric we publish: the research index.
The full reports this measurement came out of: State of Roofing, State of Remodeling, and State of HVAC.