Show a business owner a performance score of 34 out of 100 and watch nothing happen. The number means nothing to them, it sounds like a technical hobby, and they have a business to run. Speed is genuinely one of the most valuable things you can fix — and one of the worst-sold.
The mistake is leading with the measurement. "Your Lighthouse score is 34" invites the entirely reasonable response: so what?
What works is making them feel it. Load their site on a phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi, and say nothing while it loads. The silence does the work. Eleven seconds is a very long time when you're watching it happen and nobody is filling the gap.
Then do the same with a competitor's. That comparison is the entire pitch.
Visitors leave as pages get slower — that much is well established, and the effect compounds on mobile connections. You don't need a precise figure to make the point, and quoting one as though it were law is how this conversation loses credibility.
Frame it as arithmetic they can check: "You get maybe 400 visitors a month. If even one in ten is giving up before the page appears, and your average job is £400, that's worth looking at." Conservative, clearly an estimate, and in their currency rather than in milliseconds.
The key idea: never open with a score. Load the site on a phone and stay quiet while it loads. The owner experiences the wait their customers experience, and that lands in a way no number does.
On small business sites the causes are remarkably consistent:
The first item alone accounts for a large share of it, and compressing images is the cheapest win in this entire field.
Be clear with the client about which they're buying.
Compressing images, enabling caching, removing dead tracking scripts and dropping unused plugins can often halve load time in a few hours. That's a defined job with a visible before and after.
Replacing a bloated theme, restructuring how the page loads, or moving to better hosting is a different scale of work. Quoting the first and delivering the second is how speed projects go wrong.
Record the load time before you start, on mobile, and again afterwards. A short video of both side by side is more persuasive than any score, and it's the thing the client will show other people.
That matters commercially: speed work is almost invisible once done, so unless you document the difference, the client forgets what they bought and wonders why it cost what it did.
Honestly? Usually second. A site that fails on mobile loses customers outright; a slow site loses some of them. If both are true, fix the mobile failure first and say so — recommending the less urgent work because it's more interesting is a reputation you don't want.
Testing speed by hand means loading each site, throttling the connection, and timing it. Several minutes per business, and most will be acceptable.
Page weight and load behaviour are among the things a bulk scan can measure. Running a trade through LeadCrawlr surfaces the genuinely slow ones alongside the other technical failures, so the businesses you spend time on are the ones with something worth fixing.
LeadCrawlr scans Google Maps, scores every business website 1–10, and flags the ones that need you most. $49/year, unlimited scans.
Get LeadCrawlr — $49 / year