The short answer: the main content of the page should appear within 2.5 seconds on a phone. That is the line Google itself draws between a good experience and one that needs work, and it is a reasonable target for any roofing company.
Speed matters more for roofers than for most businesses, because of when people search. After a hail storm a homeowner is standing in the yard with a phone, on mobile data, looking at three or four companies. The site that opens first gets read first.
The three numbers Google measures
Google groups page experience into three measurements it calls Core Web Vitals. Each has a published threshold.
| Measurement | What it means | Good | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | How long until the main content is visible | 2.5 seconds or less | More than 4 seconds |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | How quickly the page reacts to a tap | 200 milliseconds or less | More than 500 milliseconds |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | How much the page jumps around while loading | 0.1 or less | More than 0.25 |
For a roofing site the first one is usually the problem. A large photo at the top of the home page is often the last thing to arrive.
Test your site in two minutes
- Go to PageSpeed Insights, Google’s free testing tool, and enter your home page address.
- Look at the Mobile tab, not Desktop. Most of your visitors are on phones, and the mobile result is the harder test.
- If the report shows a section about what real users are experiencing, read that first. It comes from actual visits over the last four weeks. Newer or low-traffic sites will not have it.
- Below that is a lab test with a score from 0 to 100. Treat it as a guide to what to fix, and note the Largest Contentful Paint time.
- Repeat for one service page and your contact or free inspection page. The home page is not always the slowest.
What usually slows a roofing website down
Photos straight from the camera
Project photos are the heart of a roofing site and the most common cause of slow pages. A photo uploaded at full camera size can be twenty times larger than the page needs. A gallery of thirty of them is a very heavy page.
A slider or video at the top
A rotating banner loads several large images before the visitor sees anything useful. A background video is heavier still. One well-chosen photo and a clear headline load faster and say more.
A heavy page builder
Some themes and page builders add hundreds of kilobytes of code to every page whether it is used or not. This is why two sites that look alike can load at very different speeds.
Add-ons that load on every page
Chat widgets, review feeds, maps, tracking tags and pop-ups each bring their own code from another company’s server. Individually small, together they are often the largest part of the page.
Slow or overcrowded hosting
If the server takes a second to respond before sending anything, no amount of work on the page makes it fast. Low-cost shared hosting also tends to slow down under exactly the kind of traffic a storm brings.
Fixes, in the order that pays off
- Resize and compress photos. Serve images at the size they are displayed, in a modern format. This is usually the biggest single improvement.
- Turn on page caching. A cached page is sent ready-made instead of being rebuilt for every visitor.
- Delay what is not needed at once. Chat, analytics and similar scripts can load after the page is visible.
- Remove what nobody uses. Old plugins, unused sliders and forgotten tracking tags still load.
- Move to better hosting if the server itself is slow.
Not sure where your site stands? Our free audit includes a mobile speed test and tells you which of these is the cause on your site. Request a free site audit.
Speed tuning is part of the Care and Grow WordPress care plans, and every plan runs on managed WordPress hosting with page caching. See what we do for roofing companies on the roofing website maintenance page.