The Speed Rebuild I Won’t Sell an Electrician

I won’t put a page speed score in a quote. Not as a promise, not as a range, not even as a before and after picture.

Electricians ask. Some of them ask twice, because the last designer printed a number in his proposal and mine looks thin sitting beside it.

My reason is boring. I can’t control that number, and neither can he.

An electrician asked me once to write a target into the contract. He’d had a rotten winter, a stranger had emailed him a screenshot of a red circle with a number sitting in the middle of it, and he wanted that circle turned green in writing.

I said no, then spent twenty minutes explaining why, and I’m fairly sure he hired the guy who said yes.

He was paying to fix the part his trade is already best at. Electricians run the quickest pages of the 47 trades I ranked, at 64 out of 100 on a phone.

Run an identical page twice on the same morning and the answer moves, because the result depends on the machine performing the test and the connection it arrived over. Google’s own scoring guide tells you to treat performance as a spread of results rather than a single number, and says outright that a perfect 100 is not expected of anyone.

The thing underneath the score is real. What makes a page heavy or light doesn’t move between runs, and the number sitting on top of it does.

Selling you a number like that is selling you weather. Would you promise a customer his panel will never trip again, in writing, for a fixed price?

The sentence I hear almost every week

“The phone’s quiet. A guy called and told me our website is too slow.”

I take that seriously, and I want to explain why before I take it apart.

Slow pages really do lose people. I’ve opened electrician sites carrying photographs forty times larger than they needed to be, and the afternoon spent shrinking them was the cheapest afternoon of that year. I spent the same afternoon on a med spa gallery once and left the rest of the website alone.

A slow page also loses the most expensive kind of customer, the one who already found you. She typed your trade and your town, picked your name out of the results, and then stood in a parking lot watching a white screen think about whether to show her anything.

I’ve written up the things that actually move a load time, and I stand behind every one of them.

A plumber called me for that exact reason last year. His pages turned out to be some of the quickest I opened all season, so I rewrote everything on the site except the speed.

So the pushback isn’t stupid. It’s just pointed at the wrong trade.

Where electricians actually sit

Electricians average 64 out of 100 for mobile speed, first of 47 trades, against 58 for small business websites as a whole.

Nothing I tested is quicker. Not the software companies with developers on staff, not the surgeons with marketing budgets, not a single one of the trades I ran the same audit on.

It isn’t a handful of tidy examples dragging an average around, either. 1,478 of these sites sat through a full performance audit rather than a glance at the homepage.

The phone check agrees with the stopwatch.

82.9% of electrician sites pass Google’s basic mobile checks, where 78% of small business sites in general manage it.

When a page never bothers telling the phone that it’s on a phone, the desktop layout arrives shrunk to the size of a credit card. Your customer pinches, drags, hunts for the number, taps something advertising fuse boxes instead, and calls the next electrician on the list.

Your trade mostly doesn’t have that problem, and I checked before I wrote that sentence.

So why is the phone quiet?

I can’t tell you from here. Neither can the man quoting you for a rebuild, and his confidence is worth thinking about for a second.

He can’t tell you, because nothing on your site is counting.

49.3% of the electrician sites I audited run any analytics at all, against 58% of everything in my sample.

With nothing counting, the questions that decide your year have no answers.

Did the lettering on the van do anything? Which page did the man who called on Tuesday read first? Has your Google listing sent a single visitor to your site since the spring?

You can’t answer those, so a stranger arrives holding a speed report and his number becomes the only evidence in the room.

That isn’t a scam, most of the time. He believes it. He owns one measuring tape and he uses it on every job that comes his way, and if the phone is quiet then obviously the site is slow, because slowness is the only thing his tape can find.

Meanwhile the actual leak sits in a room where nobody has ever switched the light on.

I ask owners what their website did for them last month. The honest ones admit they’ve no idea. The others tell me about one call they happen to remember, which is a story rather than a number, and stories are how you end up paying for the wrong afternoon of work.

What did yours do in July? If the answer arrives as a feeling rather than a figure, you’ve already found your real problem.

What a rebuild does to the thing you’re good at

The bit that stings comes next.

Your pages are quick for an unglamorous reason. They’re plain. Small photographs, a phone number, a list of what you do, and nothing dramatic hanging off the top of the screen.

The drama arrives with the rebuild. A video header, a slider nobody asked for, three tracking scripts, a chat bubble and a font library from the other side of the planet.

I’ve watched a rebuild take a quick site and hand back a slow one, then quote the owner for speed work afterwards. Twice, with the same client, which is honestly on me for not warning her properly the first time.

Did anyone in your quote conversation ask what the current site is already doing well? That question separates the two kinds of designer faster than any portfolio.

The one thing

Put analytics on the site this week.

It’s free, it takes an afternoon, and whoever looks after your site has done it fifty times for people like you. I have done it in a coffee shop between meetings. If nobody looks after your site, that’s the more interesting problem and you now know about it.

Then ignore everything else in this post.

Ignore the speed score I’m quietly proud of on your behalf, because it doesn’t need you. Ignore the mobile checks, which your trade is already passing without any help from me. Ignore the rebuild, which can wait until you have evidence about what your customers actually do. When that evidence turns up, the fixes I would spend an electrician’s money on first cost a fraction of one.

When I build a site for an electrician, the counting goes on before anything goes live, and there’s no speed line on the quote at all.

Go and find out whether a single thing on your homepage is counting. Then come back and tell me the phone is quiet because your pages are slow.