Plumber Website Speed Study: 399 Sites Tested, and Google Maps' Top Plumbers Are the Slowest

In October 2026 I tested 399 plumber websites from 10 US cities on Google PageSpeed Insights (mobile, median of three runs). Only 33 (8%) scored 90 or above, the median score was 55, and the median page weighed 3.0 MB. The plumbers ranked highest on Google Maps had the slowest sites.

Every plumber I talk to has been told their website is slow, usually by someone selling a new one, me included. So I stopped arguing about it and measured plumber website speed on Google PageSpeed across ten cities, up to 60 plumbers per city.

That last finding is not what I expected, and it is not what a company selling fast websites would like to find. It is in the post anyway, along with what it means for a plumber deciding whether their site is worth fixing.

The Findings in Six Lines

• 8% pass. 33 of 399 websites score 90+, Google's "good" band. 136 (34%) score under 50, the "poor" band.
• Not one of the top three passes. Of the 29 websites behind the first three Maps results in each city, none scores 90. The best manages 80.
• More reviews, slower site. Plumbers with under 50 Google reviews (44 sites) have a median score of 66. Plumbers with 1,000+ reviews (116 sites) have a median of 50.
• Weight is the pattern. The 33 sites that pass have a median page of 0.7 MB. The 136 that score under 50 have a median of 4.7 MB.
• Booking and chat widgets go with the slowest sites. Sites with an online booking widget have a median score of 50 against 60 for sites without one.
• No builder guarantees a pass. The medians for WordPress, Wix, GoDaddy, Squarespace, Duda and Webflow all land between 50 and 61.

Want to know where your own site sits? Paste it into pagespeed.web.dev and read the mobile tab. Under 50 puts you in the slowest third; 90 or above puts you in the top 8%.

How I Tested 505 Plumbers

The method, so anyone can check it or repeat it:

1. The businesses. For each city I searched the Google Places API for "plumber in [city]", limited to businesses Google tags as plumbers (430 list plumber as their main category; the rest are mostly plumbing-and-HVAC shops listed as general contractors), and kept every result in the order Google returned it, up to 60. The cities: Austin, Columbus, Boise, Phoenix, Charlotte, Denver, Tampa, Kansas City, Sacramento and Nashville.
2. The websites. 505 businesses came back. 19 list no website, 10 list one that is broken (invalid security certificates, a page that says "410 Gone"), and 20 could not be tested (13 served a block page to the test, the rest never rendered). Franchises such as Roto-Rooter appear in several cities with the same website, so each website is counted once, at its highest position, leaving 399. For most that is the homepage; 53 are a location page on a franchise or multi-location site.
3. The test. Every website went through the PageSpeed Insights API on mobile (performance category, Lighthouse 13.5) three times, in three separate passes on 5 October 2026, and I kept the median. Scores moved by a median of 8 points between runs, which is why one run is not enough. Where Google has real-visitor data from Chrome users, I recorded that too. Platform, booking and chat widgets were identified from the code each page loads; tap-to-call links and schema from the HTML of the 371 sites whose code I could read.
4. The control. pagedrop.pro went through the same test: 98, with a 249 KB page and 11 requests. It is my own marketing site, not a plumber's, with no booking or chat widget, so it shows how light a page can be rather than a like-for-like comparison.

Positions are the order the Places API returned, searched once per city. They approximate what a customer sees in the Maps app, which also shifts with where that customer is standing.

One thing that surprised me during the run: some sites serve a "403 Forbidden" or a Cloudflare challenge page to automated tests, and PageSpeed scores that block page instead of the site, often at 100. Those results are thrown out rather than left in to flatter the numbers.

How Fast Is the Average Plumber Website?

Not fast. Of 399 plumber websites tested in October 2026, the typical one scores 55 out of 100 on Google's mobile test, weighs 3.0 MB, and takes over 4 seconds to show its main content on the test. Only 1 in 12 reaches the 90 that Google calls good.

PageSpeed Insights tests a phone, not a laptop. Google describes its mobile test as simulating "a mid-tier device (Moto G4) device on a mobile network", and it grades the result in three bands: "A score of 90 or above is considered good. 50 to 89 is a score that needs improvement, and below 50 is considered poor."

Behind those scores:

• The median plumber website weighs 3.0 MB. The median mobile homepage across the whole web is 2.6 MB, according to the HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac, so plumber sites run a little heavier than the web as a whole. 99 of the 399 are over 5 MB, 23 are over 10 MB, and the heaviest is 29.1 MB - more than a hundred times the control.
• The median site makes 92 requests and pulls files from 12 outside domains: tracking, reviews, chat, booking, fonts, maps.
• 80% take more than 4 seconds to show their main content on the mobile test. Google treats over 4 seconds as "poor" for this measurement, called Largest Contentful Paint.

It is not one slow city. The median score sits between 50 (Austin) and 61 (Denver) in all ten.

The Plumbers Google Maps Ranks Highest Have the Slowest Sites

In 10 US cities in October 2026, the websites of the top three Google Maps plumbers had a median PageSpeed score of 50 (29 sites, none scoring 90), against 60 for positions 41-60. Review count tracks the gap at least as closely as position: big, well-reviewed shops run heavier sites.

Sorted by reviews instead of position, the line is cleaner still:

None of this means a slow site helps you rank. It means Google Maps does not appear to grade websites on speed. Google's own explanation of local ranking says "Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity" and that "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." The page does not mention website speed at all. What the profile itself can and cannot do for a plumber is covered in Google Business Profile vs website.

What Makes a Plumber Website Slow?

Weight, and a lot of it comes from other companies' scripts. Booking widgets, chat bubbles, tracking scripts and oversized hero photos pile up until the page slows down: plumber sites scoring under 50 weigh a median of 4.7 MB, nearly seven times the 0.7 MB of the sites scoring 90 or above.

Weight is part of what the score measures, so the gap itself is no surprise; the useful part is where the weight comes from. Twenty-two outside domains is twenty-two other companies' code competing with your phone number for the first seconds of the visit. On these sites the usual suspects are:

• Online booking widgets. 141 of the 399 sites (35%) load one on the page tested, most of them ServiceTitan (95 sites), Schedule Engine (35) and Housecall Pro (34); some load more than one. Sites with a booking widget: median score 50, median weight 4.0 MB. Sites without: median 60 at 2.5 MB. Sites with booking widgets also tend to carry more of everything else, so not all of that gap is the widget. Online booking is genuinely useful; loading the whole scheduler before anyone has asked to book is the expensive part.
• Chat widgets. 55 sites (14%) run one - LeadConnector, Podium, Birdeye, HubSpot. Median score with chat: 49.
• Hero images and video. On 105 sites the slowest element to appear is an image, usually the full-width photo at the top of the page.

The bigger the business, the more of these it tends to run. Plumbers with 1,000+ reviews load a booking widget on 68% of their sites; plumbers with under 50 reviews, on 11%. That is probably much of the story behind the chart above.

Does the Website Builder Matter?

Less than the add-ons do. Across the 399 plumber websites tested, median mobile scores on WordPress, Wix, GoDaddy, Squarespace, Duda and Webflow all fall between 50 and 61, and every one of those groups has sites under 50.

I identified each site's platform from the code it loads:

One Drupal site is left out of the table. Wix, Webflow, Scorpion and Squarespace have fewer than 20 sites each, so treat their medians as indicative. Three things stand out, and two of them cut against what I usually argue on this blog:

• Wix has the best median of the hosted builders (61). I have written before about builder PageSpeed scores and why Wix and Squarespace score low, and it is still true that none of the 18 Wix plumber sites reaches 90. But the typical Wix plumber site here is not slower than the typical WordPress one; it is a little faster.
• WordPress can pass, and sometimes does. 20 of the 33 sites that score 90+ are WordPress, a 9% pass rate against 8% overall. It also has the most sites under 50 simply because it has the most sites, along with the most plugins, page builders (Elementor is on 129 of the 221) and widgets.
• The custom or unidentified group has the best median, not a guarantee. It scores a median of 65 with the lightest pages, but 16% of those sites still score under 50. Custom code is only as light as whoever wrote it decided to make it.

The platform sets a floor. What gets loaded on top of it sets the score.

Is a PageSpeed Score the Same as What Customers See?

No. The mobile test simulates a mid-tier phone on a slow network, so it reads harsher than real life. Across the 109 plumber sites with real-visitor Chrome data in October 2026, the test put the main content at a median of 8.1 seconds; real visitors saw it at 2.4 seconds.

That does not make the score meaningless. It shows how a page holds up on a modest phone with a mediocre connection, which is exactly when a customer with a burst pipe is least patient.

Core Web Vitals are Google's measurements of how fast real visitors see and can use a page, collected from Chrome users. Google publishes them only for sites with enough traffic: 109 of the 399 plumber websites have them, mostly the larger shops (46 for the exact page tested, 63 for the site as a whole). For those 109:

• real-visitor times are measured at the 75th percentile, as Google does: on the typical site, three in four real visits saw the main content within the 2.4 seconds above
• 50 of them (46%) pass Core Web Vitals. Across the whole web, 48% of mobile sites pass according to the 2025 Web Almanac, which measures whole sites, so the two figures are close but not strictly comparable
• on responsiveness - how quickly the page reacts when someone taps "Call now" - Google wants 200 milliseconds or less; 16 of the 71 plumber sites with that measurement are slower

So the honest reading is not "plumber websites take 8 seconds to load". It is that most plumber websites are built far heavier than they need to be, and on a weak connection or an older phone - a basement with one bar of signal, say - they fall apart.

Why Does Plumber Website Speed Matter If It Doesn't Win Google Maps?

A Google Maps ranking gets a plumber seen; the website helps decide whether the customer calls. More than half of consumers visit a business's website after reading its reviews, so a heavy site risks losing people the reviews already earned.

The sources behind that, and one more:

• BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey (1,002 US consumers, February 2026) puts website visits after positive reviews at 54%, up from 32% in 2019. Reviews do not end the decision. They send people to the site.
• BrightLocal's consumer search behavior study (1,227 US consumers, July 2026) found the latest search for a local business started on a phone for 73% of respondents.
• In a 2020 study Deloitte ran for Google across 37 brands and more than 30 million sessions, a 0.1 second improvement across four speed measures produced, at best, a 21.6% improvement in the number of users that progressed to the form submission page on lead generation sites. Those were big brands, not plumbers, so treat the size of the effect with caution, not the direction.

For ordinary Google search results, as opposed to Maps, speed does count a little. Google says "Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems", and in the same document that good results do not guarantee a top position. In practice I treat it as a tie-breaker, which fits what I saw running a fast site that nobody links to, written up in 31 blog posts, 10 clicks.

What to Do If You Run a Plumbing Business

1. Test your own site. Run it through PageSpeed Insights twice and read the mobile tab. If you land in the 50s, you are typical. Under 50, you are in the slowest third; under 40, the slowest fifth.
2. Keep working on reviews first. In this data, reviews, not speed, go with the top Maps spots. If you have to pick one, pick reviews.
3. Load the booking widget on click. A "Book online" button that opens the scheduler when tapped keeps the feature and drops most of its weight from the first load. Ask whoever runs your site whether the widget can load only when needed.
4. Question every chat bubble and tracking script. If nobody on your team answers the chat within a minute, it is weight with no job.
5. Shrink the hero. One photo, compressed, no slider, no autoplay video. Your phone number should appear before any image does.
6. Make the phone number a tap-to-call link. 337 of the 371 sites whose code I could read (91%) already do this. If yours does not, it is the cheapest fix on this list.

Fuller checklists are in plumber website design that wins emergency calls and why local business sites score low on mobile PageSpeed. If you are pricing a rebuild, what a plumber website costs sets out the options, and how much a website costs covers every route for any small business.

What This Data Can't Tell You

• It does not show that speed changes rankings or calls. It shows which plumbers have slow sites, not what the slowness costs them. That would need each business's call logs.
• It does not separate cause from company. Big shops have more reviews, more widgets and heavier sites all at once; this data cannot say which of those drives their Maps position.
• It covers the plumbers Google shows first. Up to 60 per city is well past the map pack, but it is still the visible end of the market. Plumbers who never appear are not in it.
• The untested sites are not random. The 20 sites that could not be tested include the top-listed plumber in one city, so the very top of the list is slightly under-counted.
• Franchises do not drive the Maps pattern. With every franchise and multi-location website removed, the median score by position still runs 50, 51, 53, 58 and 60 from the top band down.
• One page per business. A fast homepage with a slow booking page is counted as fast.
• One test date. Everything was measured in October 2026. Scores change whenever a site changes; the three-run median smooths out testing noise, not redesigns.
• Platform detection reads the code a page loads. A heavily customised site can be misread, which is part of why "custom or unidentified" is one group.

No individual business is named here, and none will be. For the aggregate data, or the same three-pass test on your own website, email hello@pagedrop.pro.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is page speed a Google Maps ranking factor?

Not in any way this data can detect. Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, and its local ranking page does not mention website speed. In this study the plumbers ranked highest on Maps had slower sites than those ranked 41st to 60th, and also far more reviews.

What is a good PageSpeed score for a plumber website?

90 or above on mobile is Google's "good" band, and only 8% of the plumber websites tested reach it. A score in the 60s already beats most competitors: the median across 399 plumber sites is 55. Real-visitor Core Web Vitals, where Google has them, matter more than the lab score.

How fast should a plumber website load?

Aim for the main content to appear within 2.5 seconds for real visitors, Google's line for a good result. The plumber sites Google has visitor data for showed it at a median of 2.4 seconds, against 8.1 seconds on Google's mobile test, so they sit right at the edge.

How big should a plumber website homepage be?

Under 1 MB is a sensible target. The plumber sites that scored 90 or above had a median weight of 0.7 MB; the ones under 50 had a median of 4.7 MB. A one-page site with compressed photos can sit around 250 KB, which is what pagedrop.pro weighs.

Does a booking widget slow down a plumbing website?

It goes with the slowest sites. Plumber sites that load an online booking widget have a median mobile score of 50 and weigh 4.0 MB; sites without one score 60 at 2.5 MB. Loading the scheduler only when someone taps a booking button keeps the feature without most of the weight.

Is WordPress bad for plumber websites?

No, not on its own. 20 of the 33 fastest plumber websites in this test run on WordPress, a 9% pass rate against 8% overall. It also has the most slow sites, because it has the most sites and is where plugins, page builders and widgets pile up most easily.

How do I check my plumbing website's speed?

Paste your website address into Google's free PageSpeed Insights at pagespeed.web.dev and read the mobile result. Run it two or three times, because scores move by several points between runs. If Google shows a Core Web Vitals assessment at the top, that real-visitor result is the more reliable one.