Introduction
More than seven out of ten homeowners now find tradespeople on their phones. They Google a problem at the kitchen table or on the bus, tap your website, and decide in seconds whether to keep reading or back out.
If your website takes too long to load on a phone, most of those people are gone before they have even seen your name.
You are losing jobs you never knew were available. The good news is that mobile speed is one of the easiest things to fix on a trade website, and you do not need to be technical to spot the problem.
Why Three Seconds Is the Line
There is a very famous number in website land. Once a mobile page takes longer than three seconds to load, around half the people waiting will give up and leave.
Three seconds.
That is not the time it takes to read your homepage. It is the time it takes for your homepage to even appear.
If your site is slow, you are not just losing the slow visitors. You are losing the most impatient ones, who happen to be the ones most ready to book.
Why Slow Sites Hurt You Twice
A slow website costs you in two ways.
First, it costs you visitors. Most people will not wait. They will hit the back button, click the next result, and you will never know they were there.
Second, it costs you Google rankings. Google now uses how fast your site loads on a phone as one of the things it looks at when deciding who to show first in local search.
Slow site = fewer visitors finding you = fewer enquiries = fewer jobs.
You can have the prettiest website in your town. If it is slow, none of that matters.
How to Check Your Site’s Speed in 30 Seconds
Stop guessing. There is a free tool from Google called PageSpeed Insights that does this for you.
Here is what to do:
- Search Google for “PageSpeed Insights”
- Click the first result (it is a Google page)
- Paste in your website address
- Press Analyse
- Wait about 20 seconds
You will get two scores. One for mobile. One for desktop. The mobile one is the one that matters.
Anything green (90 plus) is brilliant. Yellow (50 to 89) is fine but worth improving. Red (under 50) is costing you work.
You will also see a list of things slowing the site down. You do not need to understand all the technical bits. The most common culprits are easy to spot.
The Three Biggest Reasons Trade Websites Are Slow
Most slow trade websites have the same handful of problems. If you fix these, you fix most of it.
- Massive Photos
This is by far the most common one.
Your website probably has photos of your work, your team, and your van. If those photos came straight off a phone or a camera without being resized, each one is several megabytes in size. They were never meant to live on a website.
The fix: every photo on your site should be no bigger than 200 to 400 kilobytes, and saved in a modern format like WebP. A web designer can do this in an hour. There are also free tools online that compress images automatically.
- Too Many Plugins or Trackers
If your site is built on WordPress (most are), it probably has plugins. Plugins do useful things, but each one adds weight.
A typical trade website should have a handful of plugins. If yours has 20 or 30, half of them are not earning their keep, and they are slowing the site down.
Same with tracking scripts. Facebook pixel, Google tags, chatbots, pop-ups. Each one costs speed. Keep only what you actually use.
- Cheap or Old Hosting
Hosting is the company that keeps your website online. Cheap hosting is shared with hundreds of other websites and is often slow.
You do not need to spend a fortune. But if you are paying £3 a month for hosting, that is part of your problem. Decent hosting starts around £15 to £25 a month and pays for itself in extra enquiries within a couple of months.
Quick Wins You Can Do This Week
If you are not ready to rebuild the site, here are the wins to chase first:
- Compress every image on your homepage and key service pages
- Remove any pop-ups that fire the moment someone lands
- Delete plugins you do not actively use
- Switch off auto-playing videos in the background of your homepage
- Test your site again in PageSpeed Insights after each change
Each of these takes minutes, not days. Stack them up and you will usually see your mobile score jump 20 or 30 points.
When to Just Rebuild
Sometimes the website is so old or so badly built that fixing it is more work than starting again.
If your site is more than four or five years old, was built on a free template, or runs on a platform you no longer have access to edit, you are usually better off building a new one.
A modern trade website is faster from day one. It is built mobile-first. The photos are sized properly. The pages are designed to load in a flash. And it tends to convert two or three times more visitors into enquiries.
That is not always the answer. But it often is.
The Bigger Picture
Mobile speed is not a glamorous topic. Nobody wakes up excited about page load times. But it is one of the highest-leverage things on your website.
A two-second improvement in load time can quietly raise your enquiry rate, lift your Google ranking, and pay for itself many times over.
If you have not checked your site’s mobile speed in the last six months, it is worth ten minutes today. The result might surprise you.
Related Reading
Frequently Asked Questions
How fast should my trade website load on a mobile?
Under three seconds. Once a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load, around half the people waiting will give up and leave. Anything under three seconds is good. Under two is brilliant. Most trade websites built more than a couple of years ago are well over five seconds, which is costing real enquiries.
How do I check if my website is slow?
Use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. Search Google for “PageSpeed Insights”, paste your website address, and click Analyse. You will get two scores: mobile and desktop. The mobile score is the one that matters. Anything green (90 plus) is brilliant. Yellow (50-89) is worth improving. Red (under 50) is costing you work.
What makes a trade website slow on mobile?
Three things, almost every time. Massive photos that have not been resized for the web. Too many plugins or tracking scripts loading at once. Cheap shared hosting that struggles with traffic. Fix those three and you fix most of the problem. A web designer can usually compress images and clean up plugins in under an hour.
Will fixing my website speed actually get me more jobs?
Yes, in two ways. First, fewer visitors will give up and click your competitor instead. Second, Google ranks faster sites higher in local search, so more people will find you in the first place. The combined effect on a typical trade business is often a 20 to 40 per cent lift in enquiries within a few weeks.
Want to Know Exactly What Is Slowing Your Site Down?
A free Marketing Flight Check from Brightr includes a full mobile speed audit, plus everything else affecting how your trade business performs online. We will tell you exactly what is working, what is not, and what to fix first.