Why is my website slow, and how fast should it load?
A local business site should show its main content in under 2.5 seconds on a phone. That's the threshold Google's own Core Web Vitals treats as 'good,' and it's roughly where visitors stop giving up before the page appears. Most slow contractor sites share the same three problems: enormous unoptimized photos (a single uncompressed job photo can outweigh an entire well-built page), bloated page-builder code hauling a whole toolkit to every visitor, and cheap hosting. This isn't theoretical for us: we rebuilt a client site that took about 25 seconds to load on mobile and weighed 6 MB, and got it under 2.5 seconds at roughly 600 KB: same brand, same content, one-tenth the weight.
The three usual suspects
Photos first: trades live on job photos, and phones produce 4-8 MB images that get uploaded straight into the site. Ten of those on a homepage is a site that's slow forever, no plugin will save it. They need to be resized, compressed, and modern-format before they ship. Second, builder and theme bloat: page builders, sliders, and stacked plugins each add scripts and styles that every visitor downloads whether used or not. Third, foundation problems: bargain shared hosting, no caching, and third-party embeds (chat widgets, map iframes, tracking pixels), each quietly adding seconds.
What slow actually costs
Three bills, all invisible. Bounce: mobile visitors abandon slow pages in droves, and in the trades that visitor was often standing in a flooded kitchen ready to call someone; they called the next result. Rankings: Google indexes mobile-first and page experience is a ranking input, so a slow site fights uphill for every position. And ad waste: if you run Google Ads into a slow landing page, you are paying full price per click for visitors who leave before the page renders. Speed is the only marketing fix that makes every other channel cheaper at once.
The proof, and how to check yours
The numbers in the short answer are from a real engagement: Global Merchandising, an export management company whose site scored 41/100 on mobile performance, loaded in about 25 seconds, and greeted visitors with a broken map on the contact page. We rebuilt it on a fast static stack, kept the brand intact, and cut it over with zero downtime: 90+ mobile score, under 2.5 seconds, ~600 KB. The full before-and-after is on our work page. To see where your own site stands, run it through our free report card; speed is graded alongside nineteen other checks, and the whole thing takes about fifteen seconds. Fittingly.
Related answers, tools, and proof.
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