How to make a trade website load faster
Your laptop is fast. Their phone is not.
That is why the site feels fine to you and slow to the person who was about to ring.
They found you on Google. They tapped the link. The van photo is still spinning. They leave, and they ring the next name.
You did not build the site. You do not need a new one. You need the homepage to show up on a phone.
Google checks this. It wants the main thing on the page (usually that big photo) to show within 2.5 seconds for most visits. It measures phones and computers separately. Phones lose.
Why a trade site is slow on a phone
Same three reasons, almost every time.
| Why it is slow | What to do |
|---|---|
| The photos are too big | Shrink the photos. Compress them. Make them smaller. |
| A slider, or a video that plays itself | Kill autoplay video on the homepage. Drop the slider if you can. |
| Extra bits you never asked for | Strip unused extras. Chat, pop-ups, extra widgets. |
The photos are too big. Google says pictures are often the heaviest thing on a page. A phone-camera shot of the van, the bathroom, the new boiler, dumped straight onto the homepage, is far bigger than a phone screen needs. The phone has to download the whole file before the page looks ready. Compress it. Make it smaller. That is usually the biggest win.
A slider, or a video that plays itself. A carousel tries to load more than one photo at once. Google’s own note: only the first picture should load first. The rest fight for the same slow connection. A homepage video is worse. Google’s video guide is plain: do not autoplay unless you really must. A YouTube clip dropped in the middle of the page pulls in a lot of extra stuff before the phone number even appears. Google says lazy-loading that embed can save about 500 KB on first load. Better: take the film off the homepage. Put a still there. Link the video if you want it.
Extra bits you never asked for. Chat bubbles. Share buttons. Review gadgets. Map embeds. Each one is extra code from someone else. Google says those scripts fire more requests, pull in extra pictures and video, and can make taps feel late. The page is on screen, but Call does not react. If you do not use it, ask whoever looks after the site to take it off.
None of this is “get a new website”. It is a smaller homepage.
What to do this week
- Open the site on your own phone. On mobile data, not wifi. Wait until you can see the number and tap it. If you are waiting, they are waiting.
- Paste your web address into PageSpeed Insights. Use the phone result, not the computer one. Google tests a mid-range phone on a mobile network. It will point at the big photo, the extra scripts, or the page jumping about as it loads.
- Shrink the photos. Ask whoever has the login to compress them. Do not upload full camera files. Google names a free tool called Squoosh. WebP files are usually smaller than old JPEGs. The picture should be about the size it appears on a phone, not a poster.
- Kill autoplay video on the homepage. A still of the job is enough. If a video must stay, it should not start until they tap play.
- Drop the slider if you can. One good photo of your work beats five that never finish loading.
- Strip unused extras. Chat, pop-ups, extra widgets. Keep the phone number, the work photos, a review you already have.
If you do not want to fight photos and sliders on an old builder site, Tradehand builds a fast one free.
Then test again on your phone, and again in PageSpeed Insights. Google’s “real users” numbers cover the last 28 days, so they move slowly. The lab bit at the bottom is for today.
Check it
Paste the URL into PageSpeed Insights. Look at the phone result first. That is the test that matches a customer on the sofa.
Time is what breaks it. You know the photos are too big. You still leave them. That is why the assistant exists.
