How fast we build your site to load

That is the whole argument. Every extra second is people leaving before they ever see your phone number, and you never find out it happened because a visitor who bounces does not fill in a form to tell you.

Google is watching the same thing. It measures how long your pages take to open on a phone and uses that as one of the things it decides rankings on, so a slow site loses you customers twice: once at the tap, and once further down the results page.

The number we build to, in plain terms

We build so the main thing on the screen finishes loading in under two seconds on a phone, on a normal mobile connection. Google calls its own limit two and a half seconds. We aim tighter than that on purpose, because a test run on good wifi always looks better than real life in somebody's driveway with one bar.

And we test on a phone, not a desktop. Desktop numbers flatter everybody. Nobody books an emergency roof repair sitting at a desk at eight in the evening.

What makes a contractor site slow

It is almost never the hosting, which is the first thing everybody blames and the first thing somebody tries to sell you an upgrade on. In practice it is one enormous photo that nobody shrank before uploading it, and then a pile of add-ons all trying to load at once: the chat bubble, the review widget, the tracking script, the pop-up.

The photo is usually most of the problem and usually an afternoon to fix. The add-ons are harder, because every one of them got added by somebody who had a good reason, and taking one off means telling that person no.

When we rebuild a site, shrinking the images and cutting the add-ons nobody uses is part of the work rather than an upsell afterwards.

Test your own site in five minutes

Search for Google PageSpeed Insights, paste in your homepage address, and look at the Mobile tab. Ignore the Desktop tab entirely. You are looking for the score out of 100 and the row about how long the biggest thing on the page takes to appear.

Then run the same test on your quote or contact page, because that is the page where the money is, and it is usually the one carrying an embedded form nobody has ever timed.

If the numbers are bad, you now know. If you want somebody to tell you what is causing it and what to fix first, that is what the Site Inspection does, and speed is one of the six things it scores.