A slow website costs you calls before anyone reads a word. Google measures speed with three numbers called Core Web Vitals. Here's what they mean in plain English, the targets to hit, how to test your own site in two minutes, and what usually slows contractor websites down.
Why speed costs you jobs
- In a Google study, 53% of mobile visits were abandoned when a page took longer than 3 seconds to load 3.
- In a Deloitte study for Google, a 0.1-second improvement in mobile speed lifted the share of lead-generation visitors reaching the form page by 21.6% 2.
- If you run Google Ads, page speed is part of landing page experience, which affects your ad quality 4.
The three numbers, in plain English
| Metric | Good target | What it means for a customer |
|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | 2.5 seconds or less 1 | How long until the main thing, usually your headline or hero photo, shows up. |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | 200 milliseconds or less 1 | How fast the page reacts when they tap "Book now" or open the menu. |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | 0.1 or less 1 | Whether things jump around while loading, so they tap the wrong button. |
Google judges these at the 75th percentile of real visits 1: three out of four visits need to hit the target, including people on slow phones and weak signal, not just you on office Wi-Fi.
Test your site in two minutes
- Go to PageSpeed Insights and enter your homepage.
- Look at the Mobile tab first. That's where most of your customers are.
- If you see "Discover what your real users are experiencing," that's field data from real visitors, and it's the part that counts. Smaller sites may only get the lab test, which is still a useful warning sign.
- Then do the real-world check: open your site on your own phone, on cellular data, away from Wi-Fi.
What usually slows contractor websites down
- Huge photos. A 6 MB photo straight off a phone, used as the homepage banner. Resize and compress every image, and use modern formats like WebP or AVIF.
- Sliders and autoplay video at the top of the page. One strong photo and a clear headline load faster and convert better.
- Too many add-ons. Chat widgets, review carousels, pop-ups, heat maps and five tracking scripts each add weight. Keep what earns its place.
- Heavy page builders and plugins stacked on cheap shared hosting.
- Layout jumps from images without set sizes, late-loading banners and cookie bars that push the page down.
- Lots of fonts. Two font families are plenty.
Fix it, or rebuild it?
If the site is mostly fine and a few big images are the problem, fixing it can take an afternoon. If it's built on a heavy theme with dozens of plugins, a lean rebuild is often faster and cheaper than chasing scores one plugin at a time. The rebuild is also the moment to add online booking and instant lead replies.
For Raleigh, Cary and Triangle contractors
Try this: search your main service and town on your phone, like "HVAC repair Cary" or "plumber Raleigh". Run the top three competitor websites through PageSpeed Insights, then run yours. If yours is the slowest, that's a fixable reason customers pick someone else.
BizNerds is based in Cary and builds fast, mobile-first websites for Triangle home service companies. See how we work with Raleigh and Cary contractors.
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