How fast Halifax trade websites load on a phone.

The headline findings

Every site in the study belongs to a trade business serving Halifax, Dartmouth, Bedford, Sackville or the surrounding communities: plumbers, electricians, heating and heat pump installers, roofers, contractors, landscapers, pavers, mechanics and a handful of other trades. Each homepage was tested once, on 2 October 2026, as a first visit from a mid-range phone on a slow mobile connection. This page names no business. The point is the pattern, and the pattern is consistent.

• 86% loaded poorly. 139 of 162 homepages took more than 4 seconds to show their main content, the point Google labels poor.
• The median performance score was 63 out of 100. Only 10 sites (6.2%) scored 90 or better, and 13 (8.0%) scored under 50.
• Layout was mostly stable. 88% of pages stayed put while loading (a layout shift score of 0.1 or less), which is the one speed measure most sites passed.
• 43% had no form on the homepage, and 12% had neither a form nor a tap-to-call link, leaving the visitor to find a contact page or copy a number by hand.
• HTTPS was nearly universal. Every site that loaded served a secure connection. A further 12 web addresses we collected no longer resolve at all.
• Search basics were in better shape than speed. The median Lighthouse SEO score was 92, and 78% scored 90 or higher. The sites are readable to Google; they are just slow to reach a person.

How long the page takes to show up

The measure that matters most to a visitor is Largest Contentful Paint, usually shortened to LCP. It is the moment the biggest thing on the screen, normally the hero photo or the main heading, finishes drawing. Google treats 2.5 seconds or less as good, up to 4 seconds as needing improvement, and anything slower as poor.

1. 2.5 s or less3.7%
2. 2.5 to 4 s10.5%
3. 4 to 6 s11.1%
4. 6 to 10 s28.4%
5. Over 10 s46.3%

Largest Contentful Paint, 162 homepages, Lighthouse mobile lab test. Bars show the share of all sites.

The middle half of sites landed between 5.9 and 16 seconds. The first visible text (First Contentful Paint) arrived at a median of 3.5 seconds, so on most of these sites a visitor sees a partly drawn page for several seconds before the photo, the headline and the phone number settle.

The six sites that passed had one thing in common: they were light. Five of the six weighed under 2 MB, and three were under 200 KB.

Page weight and the overall score

Page weight is everything the phone has to download to show the homepage: images, fonts, scripts, video and the page itself. The median homepage was 2.3 MB across 85 separate requests. For comparison, a lean five-page trade site can sit well under 1 MB.

1. Under 1 MB13.0%
2. 1 to 3 MB52.5%
3. 3 to 5 MB18.5%
4. Over 5 MB16.0%

Total transfer size of the homepage, 162 sites.

Lighthouse rolls the speed measures into one performance score out of 100. Google calls 90 and up good, 50 to 89 needs improvement, and under 50 poor. The bulk of Halifax trade sites sit in the middle band, which reads as respectable until you see the load times underneath it.

1. 90 to 1006.2%
2. 50 to 8985.8%
3. Under 508.0%

Lighthouse mobile performance score, 162 sites. Median 63.

The score flatters most of these sites because two of its parts were mostly fine. Script blocking (Total Blocking Time) had a median of 54 milliseconds, and layout shift was low on 88% of pages. The pages are not busy or jumpy. They are heavy, and the heaviness shows up almost entirely in how long the main content takes to arrive.

Calls and forms on the homepage

Speed only matters if the visitor can reach you once the page arrives. We checked each rendered homepage for a tap-to-call link (a phone number coded so a phone dials it on tap) and for a form of any kind.

1. Missing tap-to-call21.0%
2. Missing a form42.6%
3. Missing both11.7%

Homepage only, checked on the rendered page at phone width. 162 sites.

A missing homepage form is a reasonable choice for some trades, as long as the call button is obvious. A missing tap-to-call link is harder to defend on a site most people will open on a phone. On one site in five there is no tappable number on the homepage at all, so the visitor has to remember it, copy it, or give up and press back to the next result.

Results by trade

Every trade with at least eight measured sites is shown below, sorted by median load time. The groups are small, so treat the differences between neighbouring rows as noise. The bigger story is that no trade is fast: the best median is still three times Google's good threshold.

Medians per trade. Weight in megabytes (1 MB = 1,024 KB). Half-point medians rounded up.

Two rows stand out. Plumbing and HVAC sites, the trades most likely to get an urgent call from a phone, were among the slowest, with every heating site and 86% of plumbing sites past the 4 second mark. Their saving grace is that nearly all of them had a tap-to-call link. Handyman and property maintenance sites were the reverse: some of the better scores, but two in three had no tap-to-call link on the homepage.

What the numbers mean for a trade owner

A homeowner with a leaking hot water tank searches, taps the first result, and waits. Google's own research has long put the drop-off at a few seconds: the longer a mobile page takes, the more people leave before it finishes. At the median in this study, that homeowner is looking at a half-drawn page for nine seconds. Some of them wait. The rest tap back and call the next name on the list, and you never learn they were there.

The encouraging part is that the causes are ordinary and fixable:

• Oversized photos. The single biggest contributor to weight. A job-site photo straight off a phone can be 4 MB on its own; resized and saved as WebP it is usually under 150 KB with no visible difference.
• Page builders and add-ons. Sliders, pop-ups, chat widgets, review carousels and animation libraries each add their own scripts. The median homepage made 85 requests.
• Background video. A looping hero video looks great on office Wi-Fi and stalls on a phone in a driveway.
• A phone number that cannot be tapped. The quickest fix on this list, and it often takes a few minutes.

Speed is one input to how Google ranks local results, and a modest one next to your Google Business Profile, reviews and relevance. Where it earns its keep is after the click. A page that shows the headline, the service area and a call button inside three seconds turns more of the visitors you already get into phone calls. That is the work behind our site optimization service, and it is built into every Lead Machine site from the start.

Test your own site in two minutes

You can run the same test we ran, for free, from Google's own tool.

• Open PageSpeed Insights. Go to pagespeed.web.dev and paste your homepage address.
• Stay on the Mobile tab. It opens there by default, and it is the view that matches this study.
• Look at Largest Contentful Paint first. Under 2.5 seconds puts you in the top few percent of Halifax trade sites. Over 9 seconds puts you in the slower half.
• Then check the field data at the top. If your site gets enough traffic, Google shows how it loaded for real visitors over the last 28 days. Smaller sites often see a note that there is not enough data, which is normal.
• Tap your own phone number. Open your site on your phone and tap the number. If it does not offer to dial, that is your first fix.

Scores move a few points between runs, so run it two or three times before reading anything into a single number. If you would like a second pair of eyes on the result, send it to us and we will tell you what is slowing it down, whether or not you hire anyone to fix it. Businesses in the city can also see how we approach web design in Halifax.

How we measured

The sites. We started from our own research lists of Halifax Regional Municipality trade businesses, then added more from web searches by trade and community (for example, plumbers in Dartmouth or roofers in Sackville). We kept only each business's own website, removed directories, social media pages and national chains, and kept one site per domain. That produced 181 sites. Of those, 12 web addresses no longer resolved, 5 returned server errors or a broken certificate, and 2 never registered a main content paint, leaving 162 measured homepages.

The test. Lighthouse 12.8 in headless Chrome, mobile form factor with Lighthouse's default simulated throttling (a mid-range phone processor on a slow 4G connection), performance, SEO, accessibility and best-practices categories, one run per homepage, three sites at a time, on 2 October 2026 from Halifax. Tap-to-call links, forms and the viewport tag were checked on the rendered homepage at phone width after it finished loading.

The caveats.

• Lab data. These are simulated lab measurements, which Google uses for diagnosis. Real visitors on fast phones and good connections will often see quicker loads, and slower ones will see worse.
• A single run. Each site was tested once. Individual scores can move several points between runs, so the medians and shares are more reliable than any one site's figure.
• One day. Sites change. This is a snapshot of 2 October 2026.
• Homepage only. Inner pages were not tested, and a business may have a quote form or click-to-call button elsewhere on the site. Eight homepages used an embedded third-party form inside a frame that our check could not always read, so the share without a form may be slightly high.
• A sample. The list is broad but not a census of every trade business in the municipality, and trades with fewer than eight sites are left out of the trade table.

Journalists and researchers who want the aggregate figures or the full method can ask at [email protected]. Individual site results are not published or shared.