Google published research in 2018 that has held up since: as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, the probability of a mobile user bouncing (leaving without taking any action) increases by 32%. From 1 second to 5 seconds: 90% increase in bounce rate. From 1 second to 10 seconds: 123% increase.
The average WordPress contractor site, on shared hosting, with unoptimized images, loads in 6-8 seconds on a mobile connection. That means the average contractor is losing 90% of potential mobile visitors before they've seen the first word on the page.
Why WordPress sites are slow for trade contractors
WordPress is a database-driven CMS built for flexibility. Every page load triggers a series of database queries, PHP execution, and plugin code running before the page sends anything to the browser. On shared hosting (GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator), you're sharing server resources with hundreds of other sites. Peak traffic hours — which for trades is exactly when you want people on your site — are when shared hosting is slowest.
Add in: 20+ plugins, none of which are maintained regularly, a heavy theme with 400KB of JavaScript for features you've never activated, and unoptimized full-resolution photos from your iPhone, and you have a 6-8 second load time on mobile. Every time.
The alternative: static sites on a CDN
Static HTML/CSS sites have none of these problems. There's no database query. There's no PHP execution. There's no plugin code. The server just sends a file. On a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare, that file is stored at data centers around the country — so a visitor in Kansas City gets served from a server in Dallas, not Virginia, with no roundtrip delay.
A static trade site on Cloudflare Pages consistently loads in under 1 second on mobile. That's not an optimization win over WordPress — it's a fundamentally different architecture. You can't optimize a WordPress site to load in 1 second without significant caching infrastructure that costs more than the site itself to maintain.
How to test your current site speed
- Go to pagespeed.web.dev and paste your URL
- Look at the mobile score (not desktop — mobile is what matters for trade leads)
- Look at "First Contentful Paint" — this is how long until the visitor sees anything at all
- Look at "Largest Contentful Paint" — this is how long until the main content is visible
A good trade site has: First Contentful Paint under 1.8 seconds, Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, and a mobile PageSpeed score above 80. Most contractor sites score between 25-50. Anything under 50 is actively hurting your Google rankings as well as your user experience — Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal.
If you're on WordPress and want to improve it
Three things that help without rebuilding from scratch: Switch to a faster host (SiteGround or Cloudways instead of GoDaddy). Install WP Rocket (caching plugin, $50/year, the best one). Run your images through ShortPixel or Smush to compress them. Combined, these changes typically improve load time by 30-50% — from 8 seconds to 4-5 seconds. Better, but still not competitive with a properly built static site.
If you want sub-2-second load times with no maintenance overhead, the path is a static site on a CDN. That's what we build.