We had a question we could answer with data, so we did. We took 304 US industrial company homepages, machine shops, fabricators, distributors, and equipment makers, and ran each one through Google PageSpeed, the same tool Google uses to measure how fast a page loads.
The short version: the median performance score was 57 out of 100, and most of these sites are slower than the point where buyers start leaving. If you have ever wondered how fast a website should load, the honest benchmark is "faster than three seconds to show anything," and most industrial homepages miss it.
The speed data
Here is what 304 homepages looked like on Google's scale.
- Median performance score: 57 out of 100. Half the sites scored below that.
- Only 7% scored in the good range (90 or above). Fewer than one in fourteen cleared the bar for a genuinely fast page.
- 30% scored below 50, which Google flags as poor.
Score is an abstraction. What a buyer actually feels is how long they stare at a blank page before anything appears, so we looked at that directly.
- Median first paint: 3.5 seconds. Half these homepages are slower than that before anything shows up.
- 65% take longer than three seconds to show a buyer anything at all.
- 38% take longer than four seconds.
- Median Speed Index: 6.2 seconds, roughly how long until the page looks visually complete.
For an engineer sourcing a part with four tabs open, three to four seconds of blank screen is not a rounding error. It is the window in which they decide whether to wait or move on.
Why three seconds is the number that matters
This is not just our opinion about patience. Google's own research into load times found that as a page goes from one second to three seconds, the probability a visitor bounces rises sharply, and by five seconds the effect is dramatic. Google has separately reported that a majority of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes more than three seconds to load.
Put those together. Google's research says three seconds is roughly where you start losing people in large numbers. Our data says 65% of industrial homepages take longer than three seconds to show anything. Most of these sites are slow enough, by Google's own benchmark, to be shedding buyers before the page finishes drawing. And you cannot see it, because a visitor who leaves during a slow load looks identical in your analytics to someone who was never interested. That blind spot is the same reason owners miss so much on their own sites, and it is why you can be the last person to notice your homepage stopped saying what you do.
It is not only speed. Half of these sites look dated.
Speed is what a buyer feels first. Design is what they judge next, in the same few seconds. So alongside the scores, we read each homepage for whether it looked visibly dated: old layouts, small type, stock imagery, the signature of a site last touched a decade ago.
49% of the homepages read as visibly dated. Roughly half. And a dated site makes a first-time buyer quietly wonder whether the company itself is behind, whether it is still active, whether it will hit a deadline. That is rarely fair, these are often excellent companies, but it is how a first-time visitor reads a stale page. Often the site is describing a business that no longer exists.
The technology underneath
One more cut, because it explains a lot of the slowness. 43% of these homepages run on WordPress. WordPress is not the villain, plenty of fast sites run on it, but a WordPress install that has accumulated a decade of plugins, sliders, and un-optimized images is a very common way to end up with a 3.5-second first paint. The median site has the classic profile: a capable company, a platform that was fine at launch, and years of additions that quietly slowed everything down.
What to do about it
If you run an established industrial company, the odds are uncomfortable but useful: your homepage is probably slower than three seconds and reads as somewhat dated, which means you are likely losing a share of first-time buyers before they see your work. The fix is rarely a full rebuild. It is usually the boring, high-return work: compress the images, cut the plugins you do not need, and modernize the top of the page so it loads fast and reads current. And the longer you wait, the more it compounds, which is the whole argument in why the rebuild gets bigger every quarter.
If you want to see how your own homepage scores against these 304, that is exactly what our complimentary homepage mockup measures.
Method note: 304 US industrial company homepages, scored with Google PageSpeed (Lighthouse) for performance and first-paint timing, plus a manual read for visibly dated design. Figures are computed from that sample, not estimated.
