We checked 1,529 Perth trade websites. Here's what's quietly costing them jobs.
Most get the basics right. The jobs are lost at the edges: 19.3% fail on a phone, 22.7% take four seconds or more to load, and 46.2% have no enquiry form on first load.
What did we find?
We pulled every Perth trade business we could find on Google, 1,877 of them across 12 trades and 219 suburbs, then loaded each one's homepage and measured it. The same few gaps show up again and again, and every one of them is a job walking out the door.
19.3%295 of 1,529
fail on a phone
The page overflows sideways or has no mobile viewport set, so a customer has to pinch and drag to read it. Most of them just leave instead.
22.7%347 of 1,529
take 4 seconds or more to load
Measured to the point the page structure is ready, before images. The median site managed 2,197 ms. The slow quarter is waiting three times that.
46.2%707 of 1,529
have no enquiry form on first load
Nothing to fill in when the page arrives. Some load a form later once scripts run, so treat this as the ceiling, not the floor. Either way, after hours it is a phone number or nothing.
38.1%365 of 959
look out of date
Copyright line reading 2024 or earlier. Out of the 959 sites where we could find a copyright line at all. To a customer deciding who to ring, that reads as gone quiet.
And 250 of the 1,877 have no website at all. That is 13.3% running a real business off a Google listing and a mobile number. Some of them are booked out on word of mouth. All of them are invisible to anyone who searches before they ring.
The good news: 80.7% pass the mobile check and 99.6% are on their own domain rather than a free builder subdomain. The Perth trades that show up on Google mostly have the fundamentals right. The money is being lost at the edges: speed, freshness, and catching the enquiry.
Why do these gaps cost real work?
Because a customer with an urgent job rings whoever is easiest to reach, before they compare anything else.
Someone with a burst pipe is not browsing.
They search, they open the top few results, and they ring whoever answers first. A site that makes them wait, or makes them pinch and zoom, loses to the one that doesn't, before anyone has compared a single price.
A stale site reads as a closed business.
A customer cannot tell the difference between a website you stopped updating and a business that closed. They just pick someone else. That is the 38.1%.
A phone number alone only works while you can answer.
Enquiries land at night and on weekends. If there is no form and no text-back, that enquiry does not wait until morning, it goes to the next result down.
What does the slow end look like?
A few real examples, anonymised.
- A Perth builder whose homepage took 19,677 ms to become usable. That is nearly twenty seconds of a blank screen on a phone. Almost nobody waits that long.
- A Perth electrician at 13,241 ms, with no enquiry form on first load either. Slow to arrive, and nothing to do when it gets there.
- The median site in the whole set loaded in 2,197 ms, so the slow tail is not the norm. It is a minority of sites paying a very large price.
No business is named anywhere in this piece, and no suburb is given alongside a result. Every number is the group, not the individual.
How we measured it
Every figure on this page comes from a query we ran against our own dataset, and every one of them is published with the number it was measured out of.
Every week we talk to Perth trade businesses who are flat out, brilliant at the work, and quietly losing jobs online without knowing it. Rather than guess, we measured it. If a stat here looks modest, that is because it is the real one.
We collected 1,877 Perth trade businesses from their Google listings between 17 July 2026 and 23 July 2026, covering 12 trades across 219 suburbs: electricians, plumbers, builders, roofers, landscapers, cleaners, garage door, mobile mechanics, air conditioning, pest control, locksmiths and auto electricians. Between 3 June 2026 and 9 August 2026 we loaded each homepage in a real browser, once on a desktop viewport and once at 375x667 like a phone, and recorded four things: whether it fits a phone screen, how long it took to become usable, whether the page arrives with an enquiry form in it, and what year its copyright line says.
Three caveats worth stating plainly, because they change how you should read the numbers. Load time is a single measurement per site from one server, so it compares these sites fairly against each other but it is not a lab benchmark. The form check reads the page as it first arrives, so a form added later by scripts is not counted, which means 46.2% is the ceiling on that figure rather than the floor. And 101 sites listed a website we could not load at all; we excluded them instead of scoring them as failures, because we cannot tell a dead site from a bad connection.
Denominators differ per check, and each is printed next to its figure above. These are businesses that already appear on Google, so this is the better-organised half of the market. Trades with no online presence at all are not in the sample.
How does your site stack up?
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Common questions
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What happens after I send it?
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