Google confirmed in 2018 that page speed is a direct ranking factor for mobile search. It has not got less important since.
For trades, this matters more than for almost any other business type. A significant proportion of trade searches happen on mobile. Many of those searches happen in urgent situations — a boiler that stopped working, a burst pipe, a roof leaking after a storm. The person searching is not patient. They will not wait four seconds for your homepage to load. They will go to the next result.
The average trade website scores below 55 on Google PageSpeed Insights for mobile. A score above 80 is achievable for most sites with targeted fixes.
What Slows Trade Websites Down
Uncompressed images
Images are responsible for the majority of slow load times on trade websites. A photo taken on a modern phone is typically 4 to 8 megabytes. Uploaded directly to a website without compression, it takes 3 to 6 seconds to load on a standard mobile connection. The fix is to compress every image to under 150 kilobytes before uploading, using a tool like Squoosh or TinyPNG. This single change can cut page load time by 60% on image-heavy sites.
Slow hosting
Cheap shared hosting puts your site on a server alongside thousands of others. When those servers are busy, your site loads slowly. Time to First Byte — the measurement of how long a server takes to respond — should be under 200 milliseconds for a well-hosted site. Anything above 600 milliseconds indicates a hosting problem. Moving to a faster host typically costs an additional £5 to £15 per month and can reduce load time by 1 to 2 seconds.
Unnecessary plugins and scripts
WordPress sites accumulate plugins. Every plugin adds code that the browser must load before the page becomes usable. A WordPress trade site with 20 active plugins — common for sites built by generalist developers — carries significant unnecessary load. Auditing and removing unused plugins, and replacing multiple plugins with single solutions, reduces this overhead. The target is a site that loads its core content before any third-party scripts run.
No lazy loading on images
Lazy loading means images below the visible area of the screen are not loaded until the user scrolls to them. Without it, a page with 20 images loads all 20 when the page opens, regardless of whether the visitor ever sees most of them. Lazy loading is a single line of code added to each image element. Most modern website platforms support it natively. On sites with large photo galleries — common for builders, landscapers, and decorators — this change alone can halve load time.
How to check your site speed right now
Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), enter your homepage URL, and run the test on mobile. A score above 80 is good. Between 50 and 80 means there are meaningful improvements available. Below 50 means your site is actively losing you traffic and enquiries.
The report will list specific issues in order of impact. The top three are almost always image compression, unused JavaScript, and render-blocking resources. Each has a documented fix.
If your site scores below 50 and was built more than three years ago, a rebuild is likely more cost-effective than ongoing patching. The code structure of an old site often makes speed improvements difficult to implement cleanly.