94% of Contractor Websites Fail Google's Mobile Speed Line

Google says a page should show its main content within 2.5 seconds on a phone, and almost no contractor site manages it. We tested 50 small contractor homepages on mobile in October 2026. 94% missed that line, and the median site took more than ten seconds.

That gives you a benchmark to measure your own site against. It also changes the usual advice about speed and rankings, for reasons covered below.

We tested 50 small contractor homepages under mobile conditions

The sample is 50 homepages from small, independent, owner-operated US contractors. It covers roofing, plumbing, HVAC, electrical and landscaping firms, drawn from five US regions so that no single market dominates. National chains were left out on purpose. A franchise or a larger regional operator plays a different game and shouldn't judge itself against these numbers.

Each homepage went through Google's PageSpeed Insights in its mobile setting. That setting simulates a mid-range phone on mobile data, not a laptop on office wifi. For every site we also checked whether Google holds real-visitor speed data in the Chrome User Experience Report, the dataset Google uses for ranking. We are not naming any of the businesses. The point is to show what is normal, not to embarrass anyone.

Slow is normal in this industry, not the exception

The measure that matters most is Largest Contentful Paint: how long it takes for the biggest thing on the screen, usually the hero photo or headline, to appear. Google publishes 2.5 seconds as the boundary for a good result. 94% of the sites we tested were on the wrong side of it.

This is not a handful of broken sites dragging an average down. Half the sample took more than ten seconds. A homeowner with a leaking pipe or a dead air conditioner is looking at a blank or half-drawn screen for that long before they see who you are.

The reason nobody fixes it is simple. The site was signed off on a desktop, on fast wifi, by someone who already knew what it would say. It felt fine. The homeowner standing in a driveway on a phone sees something else entirely. If you have never loaded your own site on your phone with wifi switched off, do it today. It settles the question faster than any report.

The median contractor site scores 60 out of 100

PageSpeed Insights also gives each page an overall performance score. Across the 50 sites, the median was 60. The lowest was 39 and the best was 79. 36% scored under 50, which puts them in Google's red band.

A median of 60, with more than a third in the red, is what a market looks like when every site is built once and never measured again. Speed isn't a priority in a trade where no competitor is fast either.

That cuts two ways. It means a genuinely fast site stands out, because the bar is on the floor. It also means "we'll build you a website" tells you almost nothing on its own. Most of the sites in this sample were built by someone. Few of them were built to a measured standard.

Heavy pages are the cause, and most of the weight is photos

The median homepage in our sample weighed 2.5 MB. A quarter of them were over 5 MB. Weight was the clearest predictor of slowness we found. Sites over 5 MB had a median load time for their main content of 18.2 seconds, against 7.0 seconds for the rest.

Three things account for nearly all of it.

• Photos that were never resized. This is the biggest cause by a wide margin. A project photo comes straight off a phone at 4,000 pixels wide and is displayed at 400. Most page builders will happily send the full original to every visitor, so the phone downloads ten times the width it needs and then shrinks it.
• Sliders and video backgrounds at the top of the page. A rotating gallery of finished jobs or a looping drone clip behind the headline looks good in a design review. It is also the first thing the phone has to load, and it is usually the largest file on the page.
• Plugin code that loads everywhere. Builder themes and add-ons often load their styling and scripts on every page, whether that page uses the feature or not. A booking widget, a review carousel and a contact form plugin can all add weight to a homepage that shows none of them.

If your homepage opens with a full-width slider of project photos, you can be fairly sure which of these applies to you.

Google has no real-visitor speed data for most of these sites

Here is the part the usual advice misses. Google's ranking signal for speed is built from field data: load times recorded from real Chrome users visiting your site. It does not rank on the lab score PageSpeed Insights gives you.

Chrome only publishes that field data once a site gets a meaningful volume of real visits. Of our 50 sites, Google held it for seven. For the other forty-three, 86% of the sample, not enough people visit for Google to have measured anything at all.

So the common line that "slow sites get penalized in Google" is mostly beside the point for a typical small contractor. A site below the threshold isn't being penalized for speed. It isn't being visited enough to register. That is a far starker statement about a business's presence online than any ranking position, and it's a problem for local SEO to solve before speed ever becomes a ranking question.

Speed still matters for these sites, for a more direct reason. The homeowner on a phone gives up before the page loads and calls the next name on the list. For most contractors, the lab test is the only speed measurement their site will ever get, so it's the one worth reading.

You can check your own site against these numbers in a few minutes

Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and make sure the mobile tab is selected. Then look at three things.

1. Is there a field-data section at the top? If PageSpeed shows real-user results, you are among the minority of contractor sites with enough traffic to be measured, and those figures are the ones Google ranks on. If it shows only the lab result, you are in the large majority, and the lab result is what tells you how homeowners are likely to experience the page.
2. Your Largest Contentful Paint. Under 2.5 seconds puts you among the very few contractor sites in our sample that pass. Over ten seconds puts you in the slower half. Anywhere in between is typical, which is not the same as acceptable.
3. Your performance score and page weight. A score above 60 beats the median contractor site. Under 50 puts you in the red band with more than a third of the sample. For weight, look at the total page size in the diagnostics. Under 2.5 MB is lighter than half the sites we tested. Over 5 MB puts you in the heaviest quarter, where main content took a median of 18.2 seconds to appear.

If you'd rather have someone read the results for you, our free audit covers this alongside how your site and Google Business Profile are performing.

When nearly everyone is slow, being fast is cheap to buy

When 94% of the small contractors in a market fail Google's line, a site that loads in under 2.5 seconds is something a homeowner notices directly. It isn't a box ticked for an algorithm. It is the difference between your number appearing on the screen and the visitor hitting the back button.

The fixes that matter are the ones that cut weight, and they are not expensive.

• Resize and compress every photo before it goes on the site, and serve it as WebP. This is the highest return per hour available on a contractor site.
• Replace a video background or slider at the top of the page with a single, properly sized photo.
• Lazy-load images further down the page so the phone only fetches them when the visitor scrolls.
• Remove plugins you no longer use, and stop the ones you keep from loading on pages that don't need them.

The wider lesson is about how sites get built. Most of the sites in this sample were finished, approved and never tested on a phone again. Whoever builds your site, ask for a mobile speed figure in writing before the work starts, and check it yourself on launch day. That is how we approach website builds, and it is a fair standard to hold anyone to.