I tested 780 Los Angeles contractor websites on a phone. Here is what I found.

Every contractor I write to hears the same thing from me: your site is slow on a phone. I wanted to know whether that is a lazy sales line or the actual state of the market, so in September 2026 I checked it.

How the data was collected

I pulled every business Google lists for five searches: general contractor, home remodeling contractor, kitchen and bathroom remodeling, ADU builder and design-build contractor, in 20 cities and neighborhoods of Los Angeles County, from Santa Monica and Venice to Pasadena, Torrance and Long Beach. I kept the ones with at least 10 Google reviews and an operational listing: 780 companies.

For each one I opened the website the way a homeowner does, on a phone, and ran it through Google's PageSpeed Insights (mobile, lab data, the same test Google uses in Search Console). Sites that did not load at all were counted separately. The final sample with a full speed test is 512 websites.

The headline numbers

Metric (mobile)	Result
Median PageSpeed performance score	59 out of 100
Sites scoring below 50	29%
Sites scoring 90 or better	6%
Median time to show the main content (LCP)	7.2 seconds
Sites slower than Google's 2.5-second "good" mark	95%
Sites slower than 10 seconds	38%
Median page weight	3.2 MB
Pages heavier than 5 MB	32%

Google's own threshold for a "good" load is 2.5 seconds for the largest element on the screen. Nineteen out of twenty contractor sites in Los Angeles miss it. More than a third take longer than ten seconds, which on a job site with two bars of signal is an eternity.

What the slow sites have in common

Page builders. 357 of the 780 companies run WordPress, and 290 of those use Elementor. Add GoDaddy's builder (54 sites), Wix (51), WPBakery (39), Squarespace (32) and Divi (20), and you get the picture: most contractor sites are assembled from drag-and-drop blocks that ship megabytes of code the page never uses.

Hero videos and sliders. The single biggest reason for a 20 MB page is an autoplaying video or a slider with five full-size photos above the fold. On a laptop it looks great. On a phone it is the reason the visitor never sees the phone number.

Unresized photos. Project galleries with 4,000-pixel images straight from the camera. A 300 KB photo that could be 40 KB, twenty times per page.

Nobody is measuring. 28% of the sites have no analytics at all, not Google Analytics, not Tag Manager. In 87% there is no Google Ads conversion tag in the page source (some hide it inside Tag Manager, but most of these businesses simply do not track what their ads produce). You cannot fix what you never look at.

It is not only speed

A few more things fell out of the same crawl:

• 22% of the sites have no tap-to-call link. The phone number is plain text: on a phone you have to memorize it and dial.
• Only 10% have a page that answers "how much does it cost". Homeowners search for the price before they call. If your site is silent, they call the site that answered.
• 31% have a blog, and most of those stopped in 2023.
• Of the sites that show a copyright year in the footer, 29% say 2024 or earlier. It is a small thing, and it is the first thing a visitor reads at the bottom of the page.
• 7% of the companies have no website at all, with dozens of Google reviews behind them.

One more finding surprised me. I expected the busiest companies to have the best sites. They do not: businesses with 100+ reviews have a median mobile score of 56, businesses with fewer than 40 reviews score 59. Reputation buys work, it does not buy a fast website.

What it costs

A Los Angeles kitchen remodel runs from about $55,000 up; a bathroom from about $30,000. If a slow site loses one of every five homeowners who tap your ad, and the ad brought them at $20 to $30 per click, the math is not subtle. The site is the most expensive thing you own that nobody ever budgets for.

What to fix first

1. Measure. Run your own site through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Write down the score, the LCP and the page weight. Do it before any redesign talk.
2. Kill the hero video and the slider. One still image, properly sized, with the phone number and a quote button on top of it.
3. Resize and convert every image. WebP, sized to the box it sits in, lazy-loaded below the fold. This alone usually cuts page weight by half.
4. Cut plugins and third-party scripts. Every chat widget, review carousel and font library is another second on a phone. Keep what produces calls.
5. Make the phone number a link on every page, above the fold, and track it.
6. Add analytics and conversion tracking before you spend another dollar on ads. Otherwise you are buying clicks, not leads.

It can be done without giving up the visuals. The site I built for a design-build contractor in Venice opens with a full-screen video, 73 project case studies and an AI assistant, and still scores 92 on mobile with accessibility, best practices and SEO at 100; the main content shows in 1.6 to 1.8 seconds on a phone. Most contractor sites can be brought under 1 MB and under 2.5 seconds on the current design. Some are cheaper to rebuild than to repair, and the audit is where that decision gets made.