Turning Page Speed Into a 19% Conversion Gain
Roto-Rooter is North America's largest provider of plumbing and drain services, with a high percentage of traffic coming from mobile users searching for emergency plumbing help. When Google made mobile page speed a ranking factor in 2018, site performance became directly tied to SEO visibility and revenue. For a business where most customers find their provider through search at the moment they have a problem, slower pages meant fewer calls. The site was slow, heavy, and underperforming against every core web metric.
The Problem
Load times were dragging on mobile — the exact context where most customers were arriving. The site was bloated with unoptimized fonts, images, and scripts, generating excessive server requests per page load. Lighthouse and accessibility scores were low. Performance was directly suppressing search rankings and conversion rates, which in a service business with high-intent search traffic translates immediately to lost revenue. The challenge was improving speed and technical performance without compromising brand consistency or the usability of core conversion flows like service requests and location finding.
The Approach
I conducted a full-site audit against Google Lighthouse and Web Page Test benchmarks, measuring load time, speed index, bytes in, and server request volume. From there I built a prioritized roadmap that balanced performance gains with usability — not every optimization is worth taking if it degrades the experience.
The design decisions were performance-driven: standardizing and reducing font usage across the site, converting images to WebP format, eliminating unnecessary server calls, and building reusable design system components to limit code duplication. I designed responsive patterns optimized specifically for mobile-first traffic, ensuring that the highest-intent user path — someone with a plumbing emergency searching on their phone — loaded fast and converted cleanly.
Beyond the immediate optimizations, I established a scalable design system that was adopted organization-wide and by external vendors. This was important for sustainability — without a shared system enforcing performance standards, the site would have drifted back to its previous state as different teams and agencies added content and features. The design system made performance a structural default rather than a one-time fix.
Impact
54% reduction in page load time
73% improvement in Lighthouse and accessibility scores
19% increase in conversion rates
Organization-wide adoption of a unified design system, ensuring performance gains were sustained across teams and external vendors