What a slow website actually costs a tradesperson

The numbers Google actually found

Google published research showing that as page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of a mobile visitor bouncing increases by 32%. From one second to five seconds, that probability jumps by 90%. From one second to ten seconds, it's 123%.

Every second matters. And most WordPress trades websites load in four, five, or six seconds on mobile — sometimes more on a poor connection.

Who's searching on mobile and why it matters

Over 70% of searches for trades services happen on mobile. That number is even higher for emergency searches — the kind of searches that result in immediate bookings rather than someone comparing quotes over a few days.

Think about the context. Someone's boiler breaks on a Sunday morning. They pull out their phone and search "emergency boiler repair Manchester." They get a list of results. They tap the first one that looks like a real business. The site takes four seconds to load. They're already back on Google looking at the next result.

You never got the chance to pitch yourself. The site just didn't load fast enough.

What does a bounce actually cost?

Let's run some numbers for a typical plumber.

Say your website gets 300 visits a month from local search. Your site loads in five seconds on mobile, which means roughly 60% of visitors leave before it fully loads — that's a widely-cited industry benchmark for a five-second load time.

That means around 180 people per month are leaving your site before they've seen it. Of the 120 who stay, maybe 5–8% make contact. That's 6–10 enquiries per month.

But if your site loaded in under a second — as a static HTML site does — and your bounce rate dropped to 20%, you'd have 240 visitors reaching your actual site. At the same conversion rate, that's 12–19 enquiries per month.

For a plumber charging £150–300 per call-out, that gap is worth thousands of pounds a month in missed work.

Site speed as a ranking factor

Beyond the direct bounce rate problem, there's a second way slow sites cost you money: they rank lower.

Google uses Core Web Vitals — a set of speed and user experience metrics — as ranking signals. Sites that load slowly score poorly on Core Web Vitals. Sites that score poorly get pushed down in the search results. Being pushed down in search results means fewer people find you in the first place.

So a slow site doesn't just lose visitors who find it. It also prevents you from being found by visitors who would have clicked through.

What makes a trades website slow

The main culprits, in order of impact:

• Unoptimised images — the single biggest cause of slow pages. A photo taken on a phone is often 3–5MB. A properly optimised web image should be under 200KB. Many trades websites serve full-resolution phone photos directly.
• WordPress and plugins — every page load on a WordPress site involves database queries, PHP processing, and multiple plugin scripts running in sequence. Even a well-built WordPress site is significantly slower than a static alternative.
• Render-blocking scripts — JavaScript and CSS files that load before the page can display anything. Every second the browser spends downloading a script is a second the visitor sees a blank screen.
• Cheap shared hosting — a server shared with thousands of other sites that slows down under load. The opposite of a CDN-distributed static site that loads from a server near the visitor.
• No caching — serving the same page fresh every time instead of storing a cached version that loads instantly.

How to check your own site's speed

Google provides a free tool: PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev). Enter your website address and it'll give you a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop, plus specific recommendations.

A score below 50 on mobile is a serious problem. A score of 50–70 is poor but not catastrophic. A score above 90 is where you want to be.

The mobile score is the one that matters most. Desktop scores are almost always higher — it's the mobile performance that determines how most of your potential customers experience your site.

The fix

For an existing WordPress site, the fixes are real but limited. You can optimise images, install a caching plugin, use a CDN, and update to a faster theme. You can improve your score from 40 to 60. But you're still fighting the fundamental overhead of WordPress on every page load.

A static HTML site doesn't have that overhead. There's no database, no PHP, no plugin stack. The server just sends HTML files, which browsers load in milliseconds. A well-built static site will score 90+ on PageSpeed out of the box, on every page, consistently.

If you want to know exactly how your current site is performing — and what it's costing you — request a free audit. We'll check your PageSpeed score, bounce rate indicators, and ranking position, and give you a plain-English breakdown of the impact.