Most advice about website speed comes with a number attached, and a lot of those numbers come from someone selling you a faster website. Here are the numbers Google itself publishes, how to check your own site against them, and what usually slows a contractor site down.
Google's Yardstick: Core Web Vitals
Google measures three things about how a page feels to a real visitor, and publishes what counts as "good" for each one in its "Web Vitals" guide on web.dev, Google's site for web developers.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long until the main thing on the page, usually your headline or your big photo, shows up. Good is within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page reacts when someone taps a button or opens a menu. Good is 200 milliseconds or less.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while it loads, which is why people tap the wrong button. Good is 0.1 or less.
Google says to judge these at the 75th percentile of page loads, separately for phones and computers. In plain English: about three out of four real visits should hit the mark, not just the one you tried on your office Wi-Fi.
What Speed Does (and Doesn't Do) for Rankings
Google's Search Central page on page experience says Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems. The same page says good scores don't guarantee you'll rank at the top, and that Google will still show the most relevant result even when its page experience is poor.
So speed isn't a shortcut to the top of Google. A fast page about the wrong thing still loses. But a slow page makes a homeowner wait, and a homeowner standing in a wet basement isn't patient.
How to Check Your Own Site
Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), Google's free tool, paste in your homepage address and run it. Start with the Mobile results.
The top section shows real visits from Chrome users over the last 28 days, measured against the three numbers above. That's the part Google's yardstick is about. Small local sites often don't have enough visits for Google to show it yet. If yours doesn't, use the lab test underneath as your guide.
The 0–100 score in the lab test is a simulated phone loading your page once. It's good for finding problems, but don't chase the score for its own sake. Fix what it flags.
Run it on your most important service page too, not just the homepage. That's often the page a homeowner lands on from Google.
What Usually Slows a Contractor Site Down
Photos straight off your phone. A phone photo is several megabytes; a web page needs a version sized and compressed for the screen. Good website platforms do this for you. Check that yours does.
Add-ons. Every chat bubble, slider, review widget, tracking script and plugin adds code a phone has to download and run. One is fine. Ten add up.
Things that jump. Banners, ads and images without a set size push the page around as they load. That's what CLS measures.
Slow hosting. Cheap shared hosting can take a while just to start sending the page, before any of the above even begins.
About Speed Promises
You won't find a load-time promise on this site. How fast a page loads depends on its photos, its add-ons and its hosting, and a number with no test behind it is exactly the kind of claim this post tells you to ignore.
Whoever builds your site, ask them to open PageSpeed Insights with you and show you the real-visit numbers. If they quote you a load time, ask where it came from.
