Air conditioning score 63.3 on mobile
We tested 169 Australian air conditioning businesses with Google Lighthouse on a throttled mobile connection. Their mean performance score was 63.3 out of 100, 1.3 points above the 12,621-site mean of 62.0. 20.1% scored under 50, Lighthouse's own poor band.
That puts air conditioning 27th of the 44 industries in the study with at least 80 sites.
How air conditioning businesses compare with every site we tested
Across all 12,621 sites the median performance score is 61 and 74.3% take longer than four seconds to show their main content. Among air conditioning businesses, 20.1% scored poor, which is fewer than the 27.3% across the whole study. The median lab load is 6.4s, faster than the all-sites 6.9s.
In the ranking, the next industry up is Car Detailing at 63.7, and the next down is Allied Health at 63.2.Industries this close together are separated by a few points at most, which is inside the run-to-run noise on a single Lighthouse test.
Against the trades group
The study does not publish a platform split for individual industries, so here is the comparison it does support. The trades group holds 2,049 sites with a mean score of 63.4, 23.2% scoring poor and a median lab load of 6.6s.
Air conditioning sit 0.1 points below that group mean. Their poor share is 20.1% against 23.2%, and their median load is 6.4s against 6.6s.
We place Air Conditioning in the trades group because installation and servicing work is a trade. The study's groups are keyword-matched on the business label, so a few sites may sit in a neighbouring group such as home services.
What a slow site costs a air conditioning business
Air conditioning searches are often urgent. A unit fails in a heatwave, or a quote is needed before summer, and the person is on their phone looking for someone who can come out. They are not browsing. They tap the first business that looks real and answers fast, so a slow page loses the job to whoever loaded next.
The work is also seasonal. Demand arrives in a few hot weeks, which means a site that is merely adequate in winter is tested hardest exactly when the phone should be ringing.
Installers lean on big job photos, brand logos for the units they fit, and a quote form. Each is a reasonable thing to have and each can quietly make the first screen slow on mobile.
We have not put a dollar figure on this, because the data we hold measures speed, not revenue. The honest version is smaller: a median lab load of 6.4s is 2.5 times Google's 2.5-second bar for a good result.
Three things to check on your own site
Tap-to-call has to work before anything loads
On your phone, load the site on mobile data and see how soon the call button is on screen and usable. In an emergency search, that button is the whole page.
Check the size of your install photos
Finished-install photos are usually the heaviest files. Compare the dimensions of the image on screen with the size of the file. A phone-width photo should not be a camera original.
Run the quote form from a phone
Submit your own quote request on mobile. Note any field that fights the keyboard, any step that reloads the page, and whether you get a confirmation.
Or skip the manual version and run your site through our free audit. If it comes back slow, the Fix Sprint is the smallest way we work on that, and our trades web design page covers a full rebuild.
These figures are the Air Conditioning row of the industry table in our 2026 Lighthouse study of 12,621 Australian small business websites, tested once each on mobile between 25 May and 5 September 2026. Industry is the business's own listed category. We publish an industry only when it has at least 80 sites, and these six pages cover the largest six with at least 100.
Poor means a performance score under 50. LCP is lab Largest Contentful Paint. Every figure here is a mean unless it says median. A single Lighthouse run can move by five to ten points, so the group figures are reliable and any one site's score is not.
The sample is skewed toward the local service businesses we prospect, so it describes sites we could find and test, not every air conditioning business in Australia.
Where does your air conditioning business sit?
A twenty-minute call is enough to look at your site together and say plainly whether speed is costing you enquiries. The Blueprint is the written version, with scope and a fixed price.