Nothing I Changed Made This Plumber’s Website Faster

“It’s the loading. My nephew reckons it’s the loading.”

That’s a plumber on a Tuesday afternoon, kettle going somewhere behind him, and it’s the fourth version of that telephone call I’ve taken this year.

One inquiry off his website in five months. He had decided the website was slow, because his nephew had told him it was slow, and his nephew was fifteen.

So I opened the thing while we were still talking.

Most of these calls arrive with the diagnosis already attached, and the diagnosis is nearly always the loading, because loading is the one complaint an owner can make about his own website without feeling personally responsible for it.

What was actually on the screen

The page arrived before I’d finished reading his number off the invoice.

A photograph of a van parked on a driveway, taken on a good afternoon, filling the top of the screen. Underneath it, in a script font, the words “Quality Workmanship, Guaranteed.”

Then three icons in a row. A wrench, a clock, a thumbs up. Experienced. Reliable. Friendly.

Then his logo a second time. Then the footer.

I’ve opened perhaps a thousand homepages belonging to trades like his, and I could have written that first screen myself from memory, in exactly the order it appeared.

You could read that entire first screen in four seconds and come away knowing nothing at all. Not what he does, not which towns he’ll drive to, not whether he answers on a Sunday.

And it appeared instantly. Properly, unfairly quick.

Worth what, exactly, to a woman watching water come through her kitchen ceiling?

The number that was never his problem

Every website I audit gets loaded on a simulated phone over a deliberately miserable connection, and I score what the visitor is looking at while it happens.

A poor score means a phone sits on an empty gray rectangle while the photographs crawl down the line, and the woman holding it decides you’re closed. His page never did that to anybody. Neither does most of his trade.

I want to be careful about what my test imitates, because owners hear the word speed and immediately picture their own office wifi. The person I’m copying is standing in a parking lot outside a hardware store with one bar of signal, and she is considerably less patient than you or I would be.

Plumbing averages 64 out of 100 on that test, and only the electricians and the lawyers came out quicker. I won’t sell an electrician a speed rebuild either, for the same reason. Every other trade I put through the identical test finished underneath them.

Nobody in plumbing asked for that. It happened because your websites are small, your photographs are photographs taken on a phone, and no designer has ever talked a plumber into a video background. My whole sample averages 58, and a fair number of those businesses are paying a specialist this month to close the gap.

So the improvement his nephew wanted him to buy was the one thing he already owned outright. Do you know whether you own it too?

Your trade does have a soft spot, and it’s the version of your address nobody ever types. Nobody’s nephew has ever mentioned that one.

The same page, after

Nothing I did made it faster.

The van stayed. The script font went in the bin, along with all three icons.

The top line became what he does and where he does it: emergency and repair work, the three towns he’ll actually drive to, and the hours a human being answers the telephone.

Underneath that, his number, printed big enough to hit with a wet thumb in a dark hallway.

Underneath that, six lines about one particular job. What the customer originally rang about, what he found once he got under the sink, what it cost her to put right.

He read the finished version back to me over the telephone and said it sounded like an advertisement in the classifieds. I took that as a compliment, because the classifieds sold plumbing for a hundred years without a single photograph in them.

Then a form. Three boxes, name, number, and what’s gone wrong. Plenty of people landing on a plumber’s website at eleven at night will not telephone a stranger, and they’ll type quite happily.

Did it get slower?

A bit, probably. Words weigh something and forms weigh something. Did a single customer notice? Not one.

He got four calls off it in the first month, which was four more than the five months before it, and one of them was a boiler replacement.

I never touched the loading, and I wouldn’t have known how to improve it much anyway. I could have spent that afternoon compressing his photographs instead, and every trick I know for getting a page to load quicker would have produced an improvement no customer of his ever experienced. Only 33.0% of plumbing homepages carry a form of any kind, so the cheapest win in the whole trade was sitting on a page nobody had rewritten since about 2017.

Speed hasn’t rescued anybody either. Plumbing lands on 74 out of 100 once I add up all ten checks, because a page that arrives in an instant and says nothing has still said nothing.

What the good ones do differently

The plumbing websites I keep going back to aren’t the handsome ones.

They answer the visitor’s question on the first screen, in ordinary sentences, and make the photography wait its turn behind that.

The question is never “are you experienced?” Nobody in history has wondered whether a plumber is experienced. She wants to know whether you cover her street, whether you’ll come out tonight, and what she’s about to be charged for the privilege.

Answer those three above the fold and the rest of the page can be as leisurely as it likes.

When someone hires me to build a plumbing website, the first hour goes on that top screen and not one minute of it goes on loading times. I’ve stopped selling speed to this trade entirely. A boat yard owner once tried to pay me for it and I sent him home instead. You already have it, and selling you something you own is how our industry earned the reputation it has.

Back to the nephew

He isn’t wrong that something’s off. He’s just pointing at the one part of your website that came out of the box working.

So do this instead of ringing him back. Open your homepage on your own phone, read the first screen out loud exactly as it stands, and stop at the fold.

Did you just tell a stranger what you do, where you do it, and how to get you out tonight?

Or did you tell her you were friendly?

If you’d rather I read it than you, send me the address and I’ll tell you what your first screen actually says. It’s usually less than the owner imagines, and it’s never, ever about the loading.