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LivePaying for clicks, losing them on the phone.
We checked the websites of 1,500 GTA service businesses in 15 categories and measured their speed on a phone. Sites that run ads are slower than the rest, and 1 in 9 still doesn’t send visitors to a secure address.
By Ridvan Oral, founder of Buildy · Data collected October 31, 2026
The short version
Businesses that pay for ads have slower sites
Of the 755 sites we measured for speed, 85 carry Google Ads or Meta ad tags. On a mid-range phone, their main content took a median of 7.5 seconds to appear. Sites without ad tags took 5.9 seconds. A quarter of the advertisers scored under 50 out of 100 on Google’s performance test, against one in seven of everyone else.
This is a correlation, not proof of cause. Part of it is likely the tracking and ad scripts themselves, which add weight to every page. Either way, these are the businesses paying for each visit, and the visit starts with a wait.
Show as a table
| Group | Sites | Median time | Over 4 s | Score under 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs ad tags | 85 | 7.5 s | 81% | 26% |
| No ad tags found | 670 | 5.9 s | 67% | 14% |
What real visitors experience
The lab test is deliberately tough: a mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection. Google also publishes how fast sites actually load for real Chrome users, but only for sites with enough traffic. Just 88 of the sites we measured had that data, so treat these numbers as a signal, not a census.
Google rated 26% of them fast, 42% average and 32% slow. Of the 62 with all three Core Web Vitals reported, 35 fail. These are the busiest sites in our sample.
Renovators are fastest. Real estate is slowest.
The gap between categories is large. The median renovation contractor’s site showed its main content in 4.8 seconds in our lab test. The median real estate site took 9.6, twice as long.
Show as a table
| Category | Sites | Median time |
|---|---|---|
| Renovation | 48 | 4.8 s |
| HVAC | 49 | 5.2 s |
| Immigration | 53 | 5.3 s |
| Electrical | 51 | 5.4 s |
| Gyms | 46 | 5.6 s |
| Accounting | 51 | 5.7 s |
| Legal | 52 | 5.8 s |
| Roofing | 56 | 5.9 s |
| Dental | 53 | 6.1 s |
| Landscaping | 49 | 6.2 s |
| Mortgage | 51 | 6.3 s |
| Med spa | 50 | 6.8 s |
| Plumbing | 47 | 7.0 s |
| Veterinary | 54 | 8.5 s |
| Real estate | 45 | 9.6 s |
The basics aren’t a given
Most sites get the fundamentals right, but a real minority don’t. About 1 in 9 doesn’t send visitors to a secure address, and about as many aren’t set up for phones at all, which means tiny text and pinch-to-zoom on every visit.
| What we checked | Share | Sites |
|---|---|---|
| Doesn’t send visitors to a secure (HTTPS) address | 11.7% | 121 of 1,085 |
| Not set up for phones (no mobile viewport) | 11.8% | 95 of 1,085 |
| Footer copyright year 2023 or older | 11.7% | 137 of 1,085 |
| Built on a DIY website builder | 13.3% | 185 of 1,085 |
| Runs Google Ads or Meta ad tags | 13.2% | 159 of 1,085 |
Homepages fetched October 31, 2026. Shares are weighted by how many businesses each category has. Ad tags are a lower bound: tags loaded through a tag manager can be missed.
Five things any owner can check this week
- Test your own site on a phone. Open it on mobile data, not Wi‑Fi, and count how long until you can read and tap something.
- Run Google PageSpeed Insights. It is free at pagespeed.web.dev. Look at the “Discover what your real users are experiencing” box first; that is your real-world result.
- Shrink your photos. Oversized images are one of the most common reasons a page is heavy. Most photos can be saved far smaller with no visible difference.
- Count your scripts. Chat widgets, sliders, ad and tracking tags each add weight. Keep the ones you actually use.
- If you run ads, check the page they land on. You pay for the click whether or not the page loads.
How we did this
Which businesses. We started from open data: the Overture Maps Foundation places dataset (release 2026-10-21, CDLA-Permissive-2.0), limited to the GTA and Golden Horseshoe from Hamilton to Oshawa and to businesses that list a website. We kept 15 service categories, left out chains and brands, closed businesses, and listings whose “website” is a social or directory page, and counted each website once. From each category we drew 100 businesses at random, 1,500 in all.
Basic checks. On October 31, 2026 we loaded each homepage once, like a browser would, and recorded whether it ended on a secure (HTTPS) address, a mobile viewport, the copyright year in the footer, the website builder, and Google Ads or Meta ad tags in the page source. 1,085 homepages loaded. The rest no longer resolved, blocked automated visits or returned an error; they were left out, not counted as broken, because open listings can be out of date. Overall shares are weighted by how many businesses each category has.
Speed. The same day we ran Google PageSpeed Insights (mobile) on 60 random sites per category, 900 in all; 755 completed, the rest hit Google’s rate limits or could not be tested. Lab results come from Lighthouse’s standard mobile test, a mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection. Real-user results come from Google’s Chrome UX Report and only exist for sites with enough traffic.
What we did not measure. We did not count prices, contact forms or tap-to-call links. Those need a full browser on every page to measure fairly, and a number we can’t defend doesn’t belong here.
Privacy. This report names no business. Only totals are published. If you think we got something wrong, write to [email protected].