Field study · HVAC · Dallas County, Texas
We pulled the official register of licensed HVAC contractors in Dallas County, found the ones with a website, and measured what actually costs them jobs — speed, tap-to-call, lead capture. The picture is rough.
Median mobile load time
5.9s
Google's research puts the point where most mobile visitors give up at around 3 seconds. A quarter of these sites take 11.6s or worse before the main content even shows.
How the load times spread
Speed is the headline, but not the whole story. Here's what else these sites ship to a phone — and how Google's own tools grade them.
7 of the 104 sites we found — about 1 in 15 — didn't load at all, even for Google. A dead site is worse than no site: the customer clicks, hits an error, and never calls back.
Google performance grade
56.3% would land a D or F on Google's own 0–100 scale.
Before speed, before SEO, a contractor's site has one job on a service call: let a panicked homeowner reach a human. Here's how often these sites fail that first, most basic test.
There's no phone number a visitor can tap to start a call — they'd have to read it off the screen and dial it by hand.
Why it costs you On a hot day people call the first company that makes it one tap. Add friction and they're already dialing the next result.
The site has no contact or quote form. The only way in is to already know the number and pick up the phone.
Why it costs you The customers who research at night, or won't cold-call a stranger, have no way to raise their hand — booked jobs quietly walking away.
Only a small share offer real online scheduling — pick a slot, done — the way people already book haircuts and oil changes.
Why it costs you It's a rare edge right now. The few who add it quietly capture the after-hours customer everyone else sends to voicemail.
Nearly every 'HVAC near me' search happens on a phone, and the typical site here takes several seconds to load (see above). But raw speed is only half of it — the site also has to physically fit the screen, and what it's built on shapes how fast it can ever be.
The page has no mobile setup, so it renders as a shrunk-down desktop site — tiny text, pinch-to-zoom, buttons you can't hit with a thumb.
Why it costs you A site that fights the phone loses the visitor in seconds, and Google actively demotes it in mobile search — a double hit.
Median mobile load, grouped by platform (site count in brackets). An association, not proof — platform, budget and who built the site all travel together. 5 platform(s) had too few sites to chart.
WordPress is the most common choice here — 43.5% of these sites — and one of the slowest, at 7.6s. That's not the platform's fault: it's what a site bought cheap and left untouched looks like. The platform isn't destiny — the build is.
A perfect site nobody can find books zero jobs. These are the signals that decide whether a company shows up in the map pack, in an AI answer, and passes the trust check a homeowner makes in the first two seconds.
The site doesn't spell out its name, phone, hours and service area in the structured format search engines and AI assistants trust.
Why it costs you That's the data behind the map pack and AI answers — exactly where 'who should I call' gets decided. No schema, no seat at that table.
The site never puts a full business name, address and phone in plain text where a visitor — or Google — can actually read it.
Why it costs you That's the exact info a customer needs to trust you and call, and that Google cross-checks to rank you locally. Hiding it fails both jobs at once.
The site still loads over plain HTTP, so the browser stamps a 'Not Secure' warning on it before a visitor reads a single word.
Why it costs you On a home-services site that reads as 'sketchy' instantly — and HTTPS has been a Google ranking signal for years.
The footer copyright hasn't moved since 2019 or earlier — a strong sign the site, and maybe the business, is on autopilot.
Why it costs you Homeowners handing over a five-figure system want a company that's clearly still around. A stale site plants doubt at the worst moment.
How we got these numbers, and the limits of what they can tell you.
Homeowners look for an HVAC company the same way every time: phone in hand, on a hot day, in a hurry. The website has a few seconds to load, show a number they can tap, and prove the company is real. Miss any of those and the call goes to the next result.
So we measured it — not for the companies that rank or advertise, but for the official population of licensed contractors. We took the public register, drew a random sample, found each firm’s website, and ran the same checks on every one. No cherry-picking, no vendor’s “top 10” list. Anyone can re-derive the sample from the same public source.
The numbers above are what we found. Below is exactly how we got them, and the limits of what they can tell you.
The headline is speed. On a phone, the typical site in this sample takes several seconds to show its main content; Google’s own research puts the point where most visitors give up at around three. We are not claiming a site’s speed causes a specific number of lost jobs — we didn’t measure any single company’s bookings, and we won’t invent a dollar figure. What we can say is narrower and still damning: a large share of these sites fail the basics a mobile visitor needs before they’d ever call.
Where you see a relationship — say, sites on one platform loading slower than another — read it as an association, not proof of cause. Platform choice, budget, and who built the site all travel together. We report the pattern; we don’t pretend to know the direction.
tel: link can read as “no tap-to-call”), sample sizes per platform get small fast, and geography is county-level. The full anonymised dataset is linked above so you can check our work.We deliberately name no company. Every row in the public dataset is an opaque ID — city, platform, and measurements only. The point of the study is the method and the aggregate, not putting any single contractor on blast.
We build fast, tap-to-call-first sites for home-service companies — the fixes behind every number on this page. Tell us your market and we'll scope it.
Anonymised, one opaque ID per site. Check our work.
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