Your website should load in 3 seconds or less. Anything slower and most visitors are gone before they even see your phone number. Slow sites rank lower on Google too, so you get fewer chances to begin with.
Three seconds. That's your target. If your site takes longer, people in Henderson or Summerlin searching for a plumber or a pool cleaner aren't waiting around. They hit the back button and call whoever was next on the list.
I build websites for Vegas home-service pros, so I see this every week. A business owner asks me why their site isn't getting calls. I pull up their site on my phone and watch it spin for six, seven, eight seconds. That's the answer right there.
Why does load time matter so much?
People searching for a handyman or a house cleaner are usually in a hurry. They've got a leaky faucet or company coming Friday. They're not patient. Google has published data showing that more than half of mobile visitors leave a page that takes over three seconds to load. That's not a small thing when your whole business runs on phone calls.
Google also uses speed as a ranking signal. A slow site is harder to find in search results. That means fewer people even get the chance to see you, before you've already lost them to load time. It's a double problem.
What slows a site down?
The most common things I fix:
- Photos that weren't resized before uploading. A phone photo can be 5MB. Your site should serve something closer to 100KB.
- Cheap shared hosting. Some plans pack hundreds of sites onto one server. Everyone slows down when traffic spikes.
- Bloated page builders. Some WordPress themes load dozens of scripts whether you use them or not.
- Too many tracking scripts or plugins piled on over time. Each one adds load time.
How do you check your own site?
Go to PageSpeed Insights. It's free and Google made it. Type in your URL and it gives your site a score from 0 to 100. Anything above 70 on mobile is decent. Below 50 and you've got real work to do. The report tells you exactly what's slowing you down, in plain language.
If you're in Summerlin or Henderson and you're losing calls to a competitor who shows up higher on Google, speed might be part of the reason. Not the only reason, but it's one of the basics you can actually control.
Speed is one piece of what makes a service website actually work. Design matters too. So does having the right words on the page. But if the site is slow, none of that gets a chance to help you.
If you want help figuring out what's dragging your site down, take a look at what we do on our website design page. We build fast, simple sites for home-service businesses across the Las Vegas valley.