Nobody has ever stood in front of a slow website and thought "I'll just wait, this business is clearly worth it." They close the tab and call the next name on the list. For trade businesses, where most enquiries happen on a phone with patchy signal from a job site or a kitchen mid-renovation, this is happening more than anyone realises.
The numbers are not subtle
Google's own research into page speed has repeatedly found that the probability of someone leaving a site rises sharply as load time increases past a couple of seconds - and mobile users are considerably less patient than desktop ones (Google Search Central). For a trade business, "someone leaving the site" isn't an abstract metric. It's a lost quote.
What actually slows trade websites down
- Enormous, unoptimised photos of past jobs (ironically, often the site's best content)
- Templates loaded with features nobody uses, all still downloading in the background
- Old plugins and scripts nobody's touched in years, still politely running
The fix isn't usually "start again"
Often it's smaller than that: compressing images properly, removing unused code, and picking a hosting setup that isn't doing you any favours. Occasionally the underlying build really has reached the end of its useful life, in which case a rebuild pays for itself faster than most owners expect - we've seen this play out directly in client work like our Merit Hotels case study, albeit at a larger scale than a typical trade site.
The verdict
A fast website isn't a luxury feature. It's the digital equivalent of answering the phone promptly - and just as easy to lose business by neglecting.