I ran a PageSpeed audit on a roofing contractor's site last week. Mobile score: 23 out of 100. Desktop: 71. Every local search on a phone — which is most of them — was hitting a site that Google's own tools rated as poor.
They'd been in business for 18 years and had no idea.
The Number That Matters
53% of mobile visitors leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
That's not a marketing stat designed to scare you. That's Google's own research, published in 2018 and repeatedly confirmed since. The behavior hasn't changed — if anything, mobile users are less patient now.
For a contractor getting 200 website visits a month, a slow mobile site is quietly losing 106 of them before they even see your services page.
Check your site speed now — takes two minutes.
Why Contractor Sites Are Especially Bad
Home services websites tend to fail the mobile test for predictable reasons:
Unoptimized images. A photographer uploaded a 4MB photo from their phone and it went straight to the homepage hero. No compression, no resizing, no WebP conversion. Every mobile visitor downloads 4MB before anything else renders.
Cheap shared hosting. The $7/mo GoDaddy plan has response times over 800ms before a single byte of your page loads. Vercel's edge network has response times under 50ms. That gap compounds.
WordPress with 14 plugins. Each plugin loads its own CSS and JavaScript. Some of it loads synchronously, which means nothing on the page renders until the plugin finishes running. Multiply that by 14.
No caching. Every request regenerates the page from scratch. There's no reason a local plumber's homepage needs to be dynamically generated 200 times a day — but most WordPress setups treat it that way.
What Google Is Actually Measuring
Google's Core Web Vitals — the technical standard behind the PageSpeed score — break down into three things:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long until the main content of your page is visible. Should be under 2.5 seconds. Most slow contractor sites are 6-10 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID) / Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly the page responds when someone taps a button or link. Should be under 200ms.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Whether the page jumps around as it loads — images popping in, buttons moving. Should be under 0.1.
All three are now ranking signals. If your site fails them, Google knows. And Google uses that information when deciding whether to show your site on mobile searches.
The Local Search Connection
Here's what makes this concrete for a contractor:
When someone searches "plumber near me" on their phone, Google ranks results based on relevance, distance, and prominence. Prominence includes signals from your website — including page experience. A site with a mobile score of 23 is sending a signal that Google weighs against you.
Your competitor with a 91 mobile score is getting a quiet advantage on every local search, every day, even if their content is otherwise identical to yours.
It's not the only factor. But it's a factor you can fix — and most businesses in your category haven't fixed it.
What Good Looks Like
A well-built local business site on modern infrastructure should score 90+ on mobile. The things that get you there:
- Images optimized at build time (WebP, correct dimensions, lazy loading)
- Fast hosting with edge caching (Vercel, Cloudflare, similar)
- Minimal JavaScript — especially no render-blocking scripts
- Fonts loaded efficiently, not blocking the first render
- HTML served fast, not server-side rendered on every request
None of this requires a $50K web redesign. It requires building the site correctly from the start — or migrating it to infrastructure that handles these things by default.
Our audit checks your PageSpeed score automatically. If your site is slow, the report shows exactly which issues are dragging your score down and what they're costing you in search visibility.
The Fix
Every site we build scores 90+ on mobile. That's the baseline. We deploy on Vercel, optimize every image at build time, use modern font loading, and keep the JavaScript footprint minimal.
It's not magic. It's just building the thing correctly and using hosting infrastructure that isn't a shared server from 2012.
Run the free brand audit. Two minutes. You'll see your actual PageSpeed score, your mobile performance, and a full breakdown of what's affecting your search visibility. No sales call required.
— Murph, VibeTokens
