Structure1 Digital Research · May 18, 2026 · Covers HVAC, Roofing, Plumbing, Electrical, General Contracting, Landscaping
We run Google PageSpeed Insights across every contractor website in our database and aggregate the results by trade, city, and state. The dataset now covers 500,000+ contractor websites across 6 trades and 48 states. The picture is consistent: most contractor websites are slow, and fast ones have a substantial competitive advantage.
This post summarizes the cross-trade benchmarks — failure rates, average mobile scores, and what separates the top performers from the majority.
Cross-Trade Performance Benchmarks
Core Web Vitals failure rates and average mobile PageSpeed scores by trade:
| Trade | Failure Rate | Avg Mobile Score | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| HVAC | 93.7% | 40.6/100 | Full report → |
| Roofing | 91.9% | 44.1/100 | Full report → |
| Plumbing | 92.8% | 45.5/100 | Full report → |
| Electrical | 92.4% | 46.5/100 | Full report → |
| General Contracting | 92.4% | 45.3/100 | Full report → |
| Landscaping | 93.4% | 44.8/100 | Full report → |
What All Failing Contractor Sites Have in Common
Across trades, the same patterns drive failure:
Unoptimized images
Service photos, team photos, and before/after galleries loaded at full camera resolution — often 3–8 MB per image. This single issue accounts for the majority of LCP failures on contractor sites.
Third-party script overload
Chat widgets, call tracking, analytics, review widgets, and ad conversion pixels each add blocking JavaScript. A contractor site with 8 third-party scripts can spend 4+ seconds just waiting for those scripts before rendering anything useful.
Outdated CMS platforms
Many contractor websites were built on shared-hosting WordPress setups with no CDN, minimal caching, and server response times over 1 second. The hosting infrastructure alone puts them in failing territory before any content is loaded.
No mobile-specific optimization
Sites built desktop-first and scaled down rarely pass mobile Core Web Vitals. Mobile requires fundamentally different performance priorities: above-the-fold content must be minimal and fast, images must be properly sized, and layout must be stable from the first render.
The Business Impact: Leads and Ad Spend
For contractors running Google Ads or depending on organic search, Core Web Vitals failures create a compounding cost:
Organic search
CWV is a confirmed Google ranking signal. In competitive local markets, a passing site outranks equivalent content on a failing site.
Google Ads Quality Score
Landing page experience is a Quality Score component. A difference of 3 Quality Score points can mean 25–40% higher CPC on the same keyword.
Mobile bounce rate
53% of mobile users abandon pages taking over 3 seconds. For contractors running paid traffic to slow pages, more than half of ad spend drives zero calls.
Conversion rate
A 1-second improvement in LCP reduces bounce rate by 8–12% and increases form completions measurably — directly increasing leads from existing traffic.
Check Your Contractor Website Performance
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City-level benchmark data showing average mobile scores and pass rates for contractors in your market.