Speed up for the customer searching on their phone
The person searching 'plumber near me' is almost always on a phone, often standing in a flooded kitchen. If your page takes five seconds to load, they're already calling someone else. In local, speed isn't a technical nicety, it's whether you catch the customer at all.
Mobile-first, because your customers are
Google ranks on your mobile experience, and your local visitors live there. A fast, clean mobile page with your phone number and a clear call to action up top beats a slow, cluttered one every time, for rankings and for the actual booking.
Fix the usual suspects
The things that slow local sites are predictable: huge unoptimised images, a bloated theme, and too many plugins or scripts. Compress your images, trim what you don't need, and check your Core Web Vitals, Google measures them, so should you. These are quick wins that lift both rankings and conversions.
Run a speed and Core Web Vitals check on my key pages on mobile, and rank the fixes, images, theme, scripts, by impact on load time.