We Tested 265 NJ & CT Contractor Websites. 94% Fail Google's Speed Test.

We measured the mobile load speed of every contractor website we could find across New Jersey and Connecticut, 278 businesses, 265 successful measurements, all through Google’s own PageSpeed testing infrastructure. The result: only 9 sites out of 265 pass Google’s speed standard. The median contractor website takes 7.8 seconds to show a homeowner its content. One in five takes more than 15 seconds.

Google’s published research says most mobile visitors abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds. Put those numbers together and the conclusion is uncomfortable: most contractor websites in our region lose the majority of their mobile visitors before the page finishes loading.

Here’s the full data, how we measured it, and what the businesses at the top are doing differently.

The headline numbers

• 265 contractor websites measured (HVAC, plumbing, roofing, landscaping, electrical, and 7 more trades)
• Median load time: 7.8 seconds, more than 3× Google’s 2.5-second standard
• 94.0% fail Google’s Core Web Vitals speed threshold
• Only 3.4% pass (9 sites out of 265)
• 21.1% take 15 seconds or longer, effectively unusable on mobile
• Median Google PageSpeed mobile score: 60 out of 100

How the 265 sites break down

Nearly half the market (49.4%) sits at 8 seconds or worse. These aren’t broken websites. They look fine on the owner’s office computer. But on the phone in a homeowner’s hand, on a cellular connection, they’re empty white screens long past the moment that homeowner decided to try the next result.

The trade-by-trade league table

Median mobile load time by trade (trades with 10+ sites measured):

Two things stand out. First, no trade passes. The best median in the study, garage door companies at 4.7 seconds, is still nearly double Google’s standard. Second, the trades with the most visual work to show off (painting, landscaping, roofing) are the slowest, almost certainly because their sites carry huge uncompressed photo galleries. The portfolio meant to win the job is what’s hiding it.

Why this costs real jobs

Google’s mobile research found that 53% of visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Our median site takes 7.8.

Walk through what that means for one business. A homeowner’s AC dies on a July afternoon. She searches, taps the first result, white screen. Three seconds. Four. She’s already back on the results page tapping the next one. The first contractor paid for a website, maybe paid for the click too, and never got seen. The second contractor got the call because his site simply showed up.

Speed isn’t a technical vanity metric. In a market where most homeowners hire whoever responds first, it’s the first response.

What the 9 passing sites have in common

The sites that passed shared a boring recipe: compressed images sized for phones, lightweight themes instead of heavyweight page builders, few plugins, and decent hosting. Nothing exotic. Most slow sites in our data could reach passing range with a focused round of image compression and theme cleanup, days of work, not a rebuild.

Methodology

We started from a list of 278 licensed home-service businesses across New Jersey and Connecticut (12 trades) with live websites. In July 2026 we measured each homepage through Google’s PageSpeed Insights API v5 using the mobile strategy, recording Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the time until the page’s main content is visible, and the overall mobile performance score. 265 sites returned valid measurements; 13 failed (unreachable or measurement errors) and are excluded. “Passing” means LCP ≤ 2.5 seconds, Google’s published Core Web Vitals threshold. Medians are used throughout because a handful of extremely slow sites (the worst measured over two minutes) distort averages.

The full anonymized dataset (all 265 measurements with trade, city, LCP, and PageSpeed score) is free to download: study-data-public.csv. Journalists and researchers: cite freely with a link. We can also cut the data by trade or county on request.

Check your own site

Two minutes, no tools needed: open pagespeed.web.dev, enter your website, and read the mobile LCP number. Under 2.5 seconds, you’re in the top 3% of your market. Over 8, half your mobile visitors likely never see your page.

If you’d rather have us do it: we run a free breakdown that checks your speed, your reviews, your visibility, and where your calls go, using your real numbers. No pitch, you keep the report. Get your free breakdown.