The state of contractor websites, 2026.

Every site we measured was too slow for Google's bar

Google treats a mobile load of three seconds as the line where visitors start leaving — its own data puts abandonment at 53% past that mark. Across our sample, the median contractor site took 11.9 seconds, and the average was 13.1. The slowest took 55.6 seconds to show its main content. Every single site in the set was over the three-second line.

Desktop looked healthier — an average PageSpeed score of 74 — which is exactly the trap: owners check their site on a laptop, see it load fine, and never learn that the phone experience their customers get is a different site entirely.

The problem by trade

Here's how the trades with a meaningful sample stacked up:

Plus 39 plumbing, roofing, and mixed home-service sites across the sample.

The same sites, rebuilt

Because these were audit candidates, we also rebuilt them on fast infrastructure to see how far the number could move without changing the design. Across the set, the average mobile PageSpeed score went from 54 to 90, and average load time dropped from 13.1s to 2.7s — same look, same content, just built to load. The speed problem is not a design problem. It's an infrastructure problem, and it's fixable.

How we measured this

Aggregated from 145 U.S. contractor and home-service websites measured with Google PageSpeed Insights (mobile). Anonymized — no business is named. This is a sample drawn from MachSites audit batches, so it skews toward sites with room to improve; it is not a random sample of all contractor sites.

You can reproduce any single data point yourself: drop a contractor's URL into Google PageSpeed Insights or the MachSites Grader and read the mobile number. That's the whole point — these aren't our numbers, they're Google's.