Where your customer actually is

She's not on a jobsite. She's in her kitchen, her basement, or her living room — and something just went wrong. The water heater quit. The AC won't kick on in July. A branch just came through the roof. She grabbed her phone, she searched "[trade] near me," and she's picking one right now.

Most of your customers are homeowners, and a lot of them are 55 and up. Plenty are women — and in most households, she's the one making the call. She's not scrolling your site for fun. She's got a problem and she wants it gone. If your site takes six seconds to load, she's hitting back and calling the next name on the list.

What "fast" means

Fast means it loads in under two seconds on the kind of phone and the kind of connection she's got — which is often an older phone on regular home wifi, or a phone with one bar while she stands next to the broken thing. That means:

  • Small images. A 6-megabyte photo of a patio is a 6-megabyte download for somebody who just wants your phone number. Resize your photos. Compress them. A job photo doesn't need to be 4K.
  • No junk. No autoplay video. No giant sliders. No popups. Every one of those is weight that slows the page and gets in the way of the one thing she came for — your number.
  • One thing on the screen. Your number, your services, a few photos, a way to ask for a quote. That's it. She's not reading your life story; she's trying to stop the leak.

The number has to be tappable

This sounds dumb but it's huge: your phone number has to be a tap-to-call link. A lot of your customers are on phones they don't want to fight with. If she has to copy and paste your number into her dialer, you've lost her. One tap, it dials. That's it.

Same with the quote form — short, on the page, no clicking through three screens. Company name, trade, town, phone. Done.

What it means for your business

A fast site on a phone means the homeowner with the busted water heater calls you instead of the next guy. A slow, pretty site with a big slider and autoplay video means she bounces and you never even knew she was there.

Fast beats pretty. Every time.