Get a real number before you touch anything
Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste your homepage address, and click Analyze. It's free, no account needed, and it's the same tool Google uses to judge your site. Results open on the Mobile tab, which is the one that matters, since most people looking for a contractor are searching from a phone.
Two numbers tell you most of the story. First, the performance score at the top: 90 plus is good, 50-89 needs work, under 50 means customers are feeling it. Second, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in the metrics list: that's how long until the main photo or headline actually appears on screen. Google's bar for good is 2.5 seconds or less.
Below the scores sits a list of suggestions with estimated savings next to each one. Skip the jargon and sort by the savings. On almost every contractor site the big items point at the same three culprits: oversized images, too many plugins and widgets, and a slow server. The rest of this guide works through those three, in order of likely payoff.
Screenshot your mobile score and LCP before you change anything. Retest after each fix so you know what moved the number and what didn't.
Shrink your images, they're usually most of the problem
Photos straight off a phone run 3-8 MB each. Put six of them on your homepage and you're asking a visitor on cell data to download 20-plus megabytes of pictures before the page settles. That's the white-screen wait that makes people hit back and call the next name in the results.
Fix them with Squoosh (squoosh.app, free, made by Google, runs in the browser, nothing to install). Drag a photo in, then on the right side set the format to WebP, set quality to about 75, and open the Resize option. 1600 pixels wide is plenty for a full-width banner, 800 for a photo in a column, 400 for a headshot. Watch the size readout at the bottom: a 5 MB photo usually lands under 200 KB with no visible difference on any screen a customer owns.
Re-upload the shrunk versions in place of the originals, starting with your heaviest pages: homepage, main service pages, and any photo gallery. On WordPress, the free Smush plugin can also compress what's already in your media library. Plugins > Add New, search Smush, Install, Activate, then Smush > Bulk Smush.
From now on, every photo gets a pass through Squoosh before it touches the site. Thirty seconds per image, and you never need this cleanup again.
Delete the junk your pages load
Every widget, embed, and plugin loads its own scripts on every page, whether anyone uses it or not. Sites collect these for years. Each one costs load time, and most of them earn nothing back.
Walk your site and cut the usual suspects:
On WordPress, go to Plugins > Installed Plugins. Deactivate anything you don't recognize or no longer use, click around the site to confirm nothing broke, then delete. On Wix, check your dashboard under Apps > Manage Apps. On Squarespace, look for Code blocks in your pages and anything pasted into Settings > Advanced > Code Injection.
Fonts count too. Pick two, one for headings and one for body text. Every extra font family is another file the browser downloads before your words show up.
- Autoplay video backgrounds and photo sliders nobody swipes
- A chat widget you stopped answering months ago
- Facebook or Instagram feed embeds (these are heavy and load slowly)
- Tracking pixels from a marketing company you no longer work with
- Booking or review widgets from services you cancelled
- WordPress plugins installed to try once and never removed
Turn on caching so your server stops rebuilding every page
Without caching, WordPress builds each page from scratch for every single visitor, database queries and all. Caching saves a finished copy and hands that out instead, which cuts the server's share of the wait dramatically. It's the best free fix after images.
Install one caching plugin, and only one, since two at once fight each other and break things. Go to Plugins > Add New. If your host runs LiteSpeed servers (ask their support chat, it takes a minute), search LiteSpeed Cache. Otherwise search WP Super Cache. Install, Activate, open the plugin's settings, turn caching on, and leave the advanced options alone. The defaults are fine.
On Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify, caching is built in and there's nothing to install. That's the trade-off of those platforms: less to configure, less you can tune.
Check whether your hosting is the real bottleneck
If PageSpeed keeps flagging 'Reduce initial server response time' after you've added caching, the server itself is slow. That's common on $3-$5 a month shared hosting, where your site splits one machine with hundreds of strangers' sites.
The free fix: put Cloudflare in front. Sign up at cloudflare.com on the free plan, add your domain, and follow the walkthrough to point your domain's nameservers at Cloudflare (you change those wherever you bought the domain, like GoDaddy or Namecheap). After that, Cloudflare serves copies of your pages from a data center near each visitor instead of making everyone wait on your one server.
The paid fix: move to better hosting. For WordPress that means a quality host in the $10-$30 a month range, and most good ones will migrate your site at no charge. It's the right call when the server is the problem, because no amount of image shrinking fixes a slow machine.
Quick way to tell if it's the host: run PageSpeed on a nearly empty page, like your privacy policy. If even that page scores badly, the problem isn't your images. It's the server.
Retest and know when you're done
Run pagespeed.web.dev again on your homepage, your main service page, and your contact page, and compare against your screenshots. Then do the human test: phone in hand, wifi off, load the site on cell data from your truck. That's the experience your customers get.
Don't chase a perfect 100. Once you're at 90 plus on mobile with LCP under 2.5 seconds, a customer can't feel the difference, and your time is better spent on reviews and your Google Business Profile.
Speed decays. Every new plugin, every batch of unshrunk job photos, every widget someone asks you to paste in pulls the number back down. Recheck after any change to the site, and give it a full pass a couple of times a year.