Mike's plumbing business had solid reviews and years of experience, but emergency calls from new customers dropped significantly over six months. His website ranked well on desktop but was basically invisible on mobile.
What Was Happening
The site took 11 seconds to load on 4G. The homepage had a background video file that was 15MB. Image files weren't optimized, and there were seven different JavaScript libraries loading for features that didn't even work properly on mobile.
Google's Core Web Vitals showed terrible scores: Largest Contentful Paint at 9.8 seconds, First Input Delay at 420 milliseconds. For someone with a burst pipe frantically searching on their phone, the site would still be loading when they'd already called a competitor.
Mobile search rankings had dropped from positions 3-5 down to 12-18 for key terms like "emergency plumber" and "blocked drain repair." That meant showing up on page two, which gets almost no clicks.
After the Overhaul
Mike removed the background video entirely and replaced it with a compressed static image. All photos were converted to WebP format and lazy-loaded. Unnecessary scripts were eliminated, dropping the page weight from 8.2MB to 890KB.
Load time improved to 1.8 seconds. Core Web Vitals went green across the board. Within five weeks, mobile rankings climbed back to positions 4-7 for priority keywords.
Emergency call volume from the website increased by roughly 60%. Mike specifically tracks calls during evening and weekend hours when people are searching on phones, and those jumped from about 12 per month to 31.
The technical fixes cost around $1,200. He calculates each emergency call averages $380 in revenue, so the investment paid for itself in the first week after rankings recovered.