Your Buyer Is Checking Your Site From a Truck With Two Bars of Signal. It Still Hasn't Loaded.

Most manufacturer and contractor buyers look at a site on a phone, often from a job trailer with weak signal. A site built for office wifi can be too heavy to load there, and a page that never opens never gets a call.

A superintendent is standing in a gravel lot, one hand on a truck door, looking up a framing sub he needs to call before noon. He has two bars of signal and about thirty seconds of patience. He taps the first result and waits.

Most manufacturer and contractor sites were checked on a big monitor, on office wifi, the day they launched. Nobody opened them from a job site. So the hero image is a 6 MB photo of a finished building, the homepage loads a slider nobody asked for, and the phone number sits behind all of it. On a strong connection that's a little slow. On two bars it's a blank screen, and a blank screen doesn't get a call.

The buyer never complains about this. He just goes back to the results and taps the next name. Three fixes that don't need a redesign:

1. Shrink the photos. Most oversized images can be compressed to a fraction of their size with no visible difference. The hero image is usually the biggest offender, and the easiest win.

2. Cut what the first screen doesn't need. Auto-playing sliders, background video, and stacked animations all load before the buyer can read a word. Put the name, what you do, and the phone number first.

3. Test it the way he'll see it. Open your own site on a phone with wifi turned off. If you're waiting, so is he.

The work is good enough to win the bid. The site just has to open before the signal drops.

— Stride Digital