A site that opens before your customer gives up.
Your customer is standing in the rain next to a blocked gully on two bars of 4G. If the page is still loading, they are already back in the search results tapping the next firm.
Because your customer is outdoors on two bars of 4G next to a blocked gully. If the page is still loading, they are back in the results tapping the next firm. Google measures it as well, so a slow site loses the people who reach it and gets fewer of them. Our own homepage scored 99 out of 100 on Google's mobile speed test on 15 September 2026.
Speed on 4G is the whole game
Most people find a trade on a phone, outdoors, on a patchy signal. That is a very different job to loading a page on office broadband, and it is the one your site has to win.
Google measures it too, and says so on its own developer pages. Google on page experience, read 15 September 2026. So a slow site loses the people who reach it and gets fewer of them in the first place. Two problems from one cause.
Our own homepage scores 99 out of 100 on Google's mobile speed test, measured with PageSpeed Insights on 15 September 2026. Largest content on screen in 2.3 seconds, nothing blocking the page, no layout jumping about while you try to tap a button. We put the number on the site because you can check it yourself in about a minute.
What makes most trade sites slow
Nearly always the same three things, in this order.
Photos straight off the camera. A modern phone takes a 6 MB picture. Put eight in a gallery and the page is 50 MB before a word of text loads. It looks fine on the laptop it was built on and crawls on a phone in a field.
Page builders. The drag and drop tools load their own layout engine and a stack of plugins before your first photo. Add a booking plugin, a chat widget and a review carousel and you have four companies' code running on your page.
Autoplay video backgrounds. A hero video can be tens of megabytes, and on a phone it often will not play at all, so the visitor gets a blank box and a warm battery.
What we actually do
Every photo you send goes through an image pipeline before it reaches the site. Each one comes out in three widths and modern formats, and the browser picks the smallest one that still looks sharp on that screen. A 6 MB phone photo usually ends up under 100 KB. You send the pictures, we do the sizing.
The pages are written by hand. HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript, with no framework underneath, so the only thing the browser downloads is your site. Fonts sit on the same site as the pages rather than being fetched from Google, which removes a connection and keeps text visible while the rest loads.
Every image is given its width and height in the code, so the page does not jump about as photos arrive. That is the difference between tapping Call and tapping an advert by mistake.
Test your own site in two minutes
Open PageSpeed Insights, put your address in and pick the Mobile tab. It is free, it is Google's own tool and it gives you a score out of 100 with the reasons underneath.
The score matters less than the line below it. Largest Contentful Paint is how long before the main thing on screen shows up. Google puts the line for a good score at two and a half seconds. Google on Largest Contentful Paint, read 15 September 2026. Over that, you are losing calls.
Run it on your site, then on ours, then on the two firms above you in the search results. That usually settles the argument.
What to look at when you run it
- Pick the Mobile tab, not Desktop, because that is where your customers are
- Largest Contentful Paint, the time before the main thing appears
- Total page weight, and which photo is the biggest part of it
- Whether the layout shifts while the page loads
- Run the same test on the firms ranking above you
A real build with a lot of photos in it
What trades ask us about speed
Does speed really affect where I rank?
Google uses page experience signals, including how quickly the page becomes usable on a phone, as part of how it ranks pages. It is not the only factor, but it is one you can control.
Can you speed up my existing WordPress site?
Sometimes, and we will tell you honestly if the answer is no. If the slowness comes from the page builder itself, tuning it costs more than replacing it.
Will my photos still look good if you shrink them?
Yes. We resize and convert rather than crush. On a phone screen a 90 KB version of a photo looks the same as the 6 MB original, because the screen cannot show the extra detail anyway.
Do you use a speed plugin?
No. Plugins that promise speed are usually patching a problem the build created. We do not create it in the first place, so there is nothing to patch.
What score should I be aiming for?
On mobile, anything above 90 is good and most trade sites we test come in under 50. The number to watch is the time before your main photo and phone number appear.
This is one part of a trade website
We do not sell this on its own. It is part of a site built for one trade in one area, with a page for every job and every town you cover. Pick your trade and see what the site looks like.
Want to see how fast your own site could be?
Tell us your firm's name and the areas you cover. We build the site first, put it on a real address and send you the link. One firm per trade per area.
WhatsApp: 07833 228973
- Free live demo
- Keep your domain
- Live in 7 days
- See it live before you pay a penny