When a furnace quits in January, most people grab their phone and search. The company whose site loads first has a head start on the call. So we checked how heating and air company websites around the Triangle hold up on a phone.
What we did
On October 5, 2026 we searched Google Maps for "HVAC contractor" in ten towns: Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, Cary, Apex, Morrisville, Wake Forest and Garner. That gave us 135 business listings.
For each one we looked at the website on the listing and ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights, the free tool Google publishes for measuring how a page performs on a phone. It scores each page from 0 to 100. Google's own bands are: 90 and up is good, 50 to 89 needs improvement, under 50 is poor.
PageSpeed returned a score for 124 of the 135 listings. Eight had no website on their listing, and the test failed on the other three.
The results
| Mobile performance | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Good (90 to 100) | 17 | 14% |
| Needs improvement (50 to 89) | 67 | 54% |
| Poor (under 50) | 40 | 32% |
The middle score was 61.
So about one site in seven is fast on a phone, and about one in three lands in the band Google calls poor.
What nearly everyone gets right
We also read the home page of each site where the server let us, which was 110 of them.
- All 110 load over a secure connection (https). A few years ago this was a common gap. It is not any more.
- All 110 are set up to fit a phone screen. None showed the tiny desktop layout you have to pinch and zoom.
- 105 of 110 have a tap-to-call link or a contact form on the home page. Five have neither, which means a visitor has to copy the phone number by hand.
The basics are covered. Speed is what separates these sites now.
What usually slows a site down
We did not take each slow site apart, so we cannot say what is wrong with any one of them. In general, the usual causes on small business sites are:
- Large photos that were never resized for phones
- A slideshow at the top of the home page
- Chat widgets, review widgets and tracking scripts that each load their own code
- Page builder themes that load far more than the page uses
How to check your own site
- Go to pagespeed.web.dev.
- Enter your website address and press Analyze.
- Look at the Performance number under the Mobile tab.
Run it two or three times. The score moves between runs, sometimes by ten points or more, so treat one result as a rough reading.
The limits of this test
- Each site was tested once, on one day. Scores change from run to run.
- We tested the home page only.
- A PageSpeed score measures how a page loads in Google's lab test. It is one signal. It does not tell you how many calls a site brings in, and we have no way to see that from the outside.
- 135 listings is what Google Maps returned for our ten searches. It is a sample of Triangle HVAC companies, and some are missing.