Core Web Vitals in plain English, and why your site fails them
Google measures how fast your site loads, how soon it responds, and whether things jump around. Most contractor sites fail on a phone on a jobsite. What the three numbers mean and how a site passes.
Google measures three things about how your site behaves for a real visitor, and uses them in ranking. They have technical names. Here is what they mean in plain English, and why most contractor sites fail them.
The three numbers
How long until the main thing is visible (Largest Contentful Paint). Google wants the biggest thing on the screen, usually the hero image or headline, visible in under 2.5 seconds. A WordPress site with a 4 MB hero image, a slider, and twelve plugins takes six.
How quickly it responds when you tap (Interaction to Next Paint). Under 200 milliseconds. Sites loaded with scripts (chat widgets, tracking, animation libraries) feel sticky; the tap registers late.
Whether things jump around while loading (Cumulative Layout Shift). You go to tap the phone number and an ad or a late-loading image pushes it down. Google counts every jump.
Why contractor sites fail
Because they are built on page builders with plugins, hosted on cheap shared servers, with images uploaded straight from a phone at full size. None of that is the contractor’s fault. It is what the $1,500 tier produces, and it is why the site that ranks first is often the simplest one.
Why it matters more for you than for most businesses
Your buyers are on phones, on jobsites, on bad signal. A PM standing in a parking lot pulling up three roofers’ sites calls the one that loads.
How a site passes
- Pre-rendered HTML. The page is built before anyone asks for it, so the server sends a finished page, not instructions to build one. This is how our sites are built; it is the single biggest factor.
- Images sized for the screen. A 1,400-pixel image for a desktop, a 700-pixel one for a phone, in a modern format. Not a 4,000-pixel phone photo for everyone.
- No plugins, no page builder, few scripts. One font, one stylesheet, a small amount of code for the form and menu. That is the whole site.
- Hosting on a global network. The site is served from a server near the visitor, not one in Virginia.
Our sites typically load the main content in under a second on a phone and pass all three measures with room to spare. We check it before launch and give you the report.
Google Business Profile for contractors: the ten minutes that matter
For local service searches, the map pack above the results gets more clicks than the site that ranks first. Here is the short list of what actually moves a contractor's profile, and what to ignore.
One page per service: the SEO play most contractors miss
Google ranks pages, not websites. A contractor with fifteen specific service pages outranks one with a single 'Services' page every time. Here is how to structure it, with examples by trade.
Fifteen minutes. No pitch deck.
Tell me what you build and where the leads come from today. I will tell you what I would change, and what it would cost. If it is not a fit, I will say so on the call.