Fast enough that nobody notices. That is the honest answer, and it maps to a number: your homepage should be usable in under two and a half seconds on a mid-range phone on cell data. Most local service sites take five to nine.
The three numbers that matter
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long until the main thing on screen appears. Target under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how long the page takes to respond when someone taps. Target under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while loading. Target under 0.1.
Google publishes these as Core Web Vitals and uses them in ranking. More importantly, they correlate with whether someone stays. A homeowner comparing three contractors at 9pm gives each site about four seconds.
Why your site is slow
In nearly every case we audit, it is one of four things: photos uploaded straight off a phone at eight megabytes each, a page builder plugin loading a hundred kilobytes of JavaScript to render a heading, a stack of tracking scripts nobody remembers adding, or a slow host serving pages from one machine three states away.
A fifty-image portfolio can load faster than a five-image one. It depends entirely on whether anyone resized them.
What good looks like
Every site we build has to score 95 or better on performance and SEO before it can go live, with zero accessibility violations. That is not a stretch goal, it is a gate — a site that does not clear it goes back for another pass instead of going out. The way you get there is boring: build the pages statically, serve them from a CDN near the visitor, compress every image to the size it is actually displayed at, and ship almost no JavaScript.
How to check yours
Open PageSpeed Insights, paste your homepage, and read the mobile tab. Then do it for your busiest service page, which is usually worse. If the number is bad, you now know the size of the problem — and you can ask whoever maintains your site what it would take to fix it.
