Most people looking for a plumber, roofer or landscaper in New Jersey search on their phone, often while the problem is happening. So we wanted a simple answer to a simple question: how fast do New Jersey contractor websites actually load on a phone?
Between October 26 and October 30, 2026, we ran the homepages of 139 New Jersey home-service contractors through Google's own mobile speed test, Lighthouse. This page shares what we found. No business is named.
The Short Version
- 93% of the sites (129 of 139) took longer than Google's 2.5-second target to show their main content on a phone.
- 76% (105 of 139) took longer than 4 seconds, and 31% (43 of 139) took longer than 10 seconds.
- The typical (median) site scored 47 out of 100 for mobile performance and took about 6.8 seconds to show its main content.
- Only 6 of the 139 sites (4%) scored 90 or higher, the range Google labels as good.
- The typical homepage downloaded about 3.1 MB. 28% were over 5 MB, and 8 sites were over 10 MB.
Why 2.5 Seconds Matters
The number we focused on is what Google calls Largest Contentful Paint: how long it takes for the main thing on the page, usually the big photo or headline, to appear. Google's guideline for a good experience is 2.5 seconds or less, and page experience is one of the many things Google weighs when it decides which local businesses to show.
It also matters for plain business reasons. Someone with water coming through the ceiling is not going to wait 10 seconds for your homepage. They hit back and call the next company on the list.
Results by Trade
Here is how the main groups compared. The numbers are medians, meaning half the sites in each group did better and half did worse.
- Plumbing and HVAC (23 sites): score 46, main content in about 7.5 seconds, 74% slower than 4 seconds.
- Roofing, siding and gutters (22 sites): score 50.5, about 6.4 seconds, 73% slower than 4 seconds.
- Landscaping and tree service (23 sites): score 44, about 9.2 seconds, 96% slower than 4 seconds.
- Electrical (11 sites): score 42, about 6.8 seconds, 73% slower than 4 seconds.
- Paving and masonry (10 sites): score 41.5, about 7.2 seconds, all 10 slower than 4 seconds.
- Painting (8 sites): score 47.5, about 7.6 seconds, all 8 slower than 4 seconds.
- Other trades (42 sites, including fencing, pest control, garage doors, pools, decks, remodeling and windows): score 53.5, about 4.6 seconds, 57% slower than 4 seconds.
Some groups are small, so treat the differences between trades as a rough picture, not a ranking. The bigger story is that slow sites were common in every trade.
What Was Slowing Them Down
The same few causes came up again and again, and almost none of them need a new website to fix:
- Photos straight off the phone or camera. Project photos uploaded at full size, often several MB each. The heaviest homepage we tested downloaded about 98 MB, mostly from two photos of roughly 9.6 MB each.
- Background videos. Several homepages played video clips of 2 to 4 MB each before anything else could load.
- Slider images saved as PNG files. PNG is great for logos but heavy for photos. Saved as JPG or WebP, the same image is often a fraction of the size.
- Too many add-ons. Chat widgets, review widgets, form scripts and tracking codes each add a little weight, and it adds up.
A Few Basic SEO Gaps Too
Google's test also checks some SEO basics. Most sites had a page title, which is good. But we also saw:
- 14% of homepages had no meta description, the short summary Google can show under your name in search results.
- 35% used vague link text like "Learn More" or "Read More", which tells Google nothing about the page behind the link.
- 25% had links built in a way Google's crawler cannot follow.
- 12% had images with no alt text, which Google uses to understand photos of your work.
Five Fixes Any Contractor Can Start With
- Shrink your photos before uploading. Resize them to about 1,600 pixels wide and save them as JPG or WebP. Most drop to a few hundred KB with no visible difference.
- Swap the homepage video for a photo on phones, or compress the video to under 1 MB.
- Remove add-ons you don't use. Old chat tools, duplicate tracking codes and unused sliders all slow the page down.
- Write a one-sentence meta description that says what you do and where, like "Family-owned roofing in Toms River and Ocean County since 1998."
- Rename vague links to say where they go: "Roof Replacement" instead of "Learn More".
You can test your own site for free at Google's PageSpeed Insights. Type in your web address and look at the mobile score.
How We Ran the Test
- What we tested: the homepages of 139 home-service contractors based in New Jersey, mostly in Ocean, Monmouth, Middlesex, Mercer, Burlington and Atlantic counties, tested between October 26 and October 30, 2026.
- How: Google Lighthouse in mobile mode, which simulates a typical mid-range phone on a slower cellular connection. That is why results can look slower than what you see on your own phone over Wi-Fi.
- Best result counted: 87 of the homepages were tested two or more times, and for those we used the best result, so the numbers lean in the businesses' favor. The other 52 had one usable test.
- What we left out: sites that blocked automated tests, runs that only reached a bot-check screen, and sites whose trade we could not confirm.
- Not a random sample: we found these businesses through ordinary web searches by trade and town while reviewing local contractor websites, so this is a snapshot, not a scientific survey of every contractor in the state.
Journalists and trade groups are welcome to use these numbers. Please credit Website Work 4 Less and link to this page.
Want to Know Where Your Site Stands?
If you run a contracting business in New Jersey and want to know how your site compares, send us your web address or call or text Mordy at (848) 368-8867. We will run the same test and tell you what we would fix first, in plain English. You can also read about our contractor SEO plans, our Google Business Profile checklist and our honest guide to what SEO costs for a contractor in New Jersey.
