Research · Auto repair
The seven second wait
Count to seven. That is how long the typical auto repair website makes a customer stare at a blank screen before anything useful appears. We measured it across 5,456 shop websites.
The typical auto repair website takes seven seconds to show a customer anything worth looking at.
Google considers anything past four seconds poor. 78% of the sites we measured are slower than that. Not slightly slower - the middle of the pack is at seven, which is nearly twice the threshold.
Seven seconds is longer than it sounds
Nobody times a website. What happens instead is that someone taps your link, sees white, and forms an impression before a single word loads. If they came from a Google search, going back and trying the next shop costs them one tap and no thought at all.
This also compounds with everything else you are paying for. Ads send people to a page that is not there yet. Search rankings account for speed directly. And the customer most likely to bounce is the one on a phone in a car park with two bars of signal, which is exactly the person who needs a mechanic today.
It is almost certainly not your photos
We expected to find oversized images and did not. The three largest images on a typical shop site come to 0.24 MB combined, while the page as a whole weighs 2.53 MB. Around nine tenths of what a customer downloads is not pictures.
It is theme code, page builder scripts, embedded fonts, chat widgets, tracking pixels, and sliders - the accumulated weight of features that were switched on once and never questioned. That matters because the usual advice, compress your images, would fix almost none of this.
How we got these numbers
We analyze local businesses and their websites. For each site we measure Largest Contentful Paint - the moment the biggest piece of content on screen finishes loading, which is the closest single measure of "the page is now useful". This covers 5,456 auto repair websites as of August 2026, taking the heaviest page we analyzed on each.
Measurements come from a simulated mid-range phone on a throttled mobile connection. That is deliberately harsher than a new phone on office wifi, and it is the same method Google uses to score sites, which is why the four second threshold is theirs rather than ours.
An honest limitation: these are the businesses we chose to analyze, not a random sample of the industry. We look for businesses whose online presence appears to need work, so the true figure across all auto repair shops is likely better than what we measured. Read this as a floor, not a national average.
What to do about it
- Measure your own, on your phone, on mobile data. Turn wifi off first. Google's PageSpeed Insights is free and will give you the same number we measured.
- Count what is loading before your phone number does. A slider nobody swipes, a chat widget nobody opens, three tracking scripts from a campaign that ended. Each one delays the thing the customer came for.
- Be suspicious of the theme. Most shop sites are slow because of the template they were built on, not anything the owner added. That is not something you can fix by deleting a photo.
- Judge any fix by the seconds, not the score. A speed score going from 34 to 41 means nothing to a customer. Seven seconds becoming three does.