Mobile performance issues on dealership websites

[darrenstromain]

Why are so many dealership websites still slow on mobile?

Usually it’s a combination of:

• heavy scripts
• inventory integrations
• third-party tools
• bloated templates

The issue isn’t just rankings anymore.

Poor mobile performance can impact:

• engagement
• lead submissions
• conversion rates

I’ve noticed a lot of dealer sites struggle once multiple vendor tools start stacking on top of each other.

Curious how many dealerships are actively monitoring Core Web Vitals right now?

 

[Alexander.R]

It's a combination of bloated templates/scripts, drift and integrations. I know personally, AutoCheck is a pretty heavy integration that injects the entirety of bootstrap styling sheets which would cause layout issues whenever that was rendered, I'm not sure if they've fixed it since. Analytics tracking scripts are a big one, even if dealerships don't integrate with Google or Facebook, those tracking scripts are usually included by default. I've seen vendors include the entirety of FontAwesome for just a few icons which is like bringing all of Home Depot with you for a hammer.

ADA integrations and chat integrations are pretty heavy too. Most vendors use a free ADA service which injects their own nonsense into a site and most chat integrations are just done terribly. On the opposite side, google's tools for determining page performance is pretty skewed towards their definition of what best practices consists of rather then what actually could be better practices.

 

[darrenstromain]

Good points. I’ve seen similar issues with dealership sites using large or unneeded CSS/JS files.

And I agree that Google’s scoring methodology isn’t perfect. However, I still think Core Web Vitals are useful because they often correlate with real world UX issues like delayed interaction, layout shift, and slower load times, especially on mobile connections.

For any dealers curious about their site performance, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can give some useful visibility into Core Web Vitals:
PageSpeed Insights

It’s definitely technical for non-developers, but it can still provide useful insight into what may be impacting mobile performance.

It’s interesting how often performance issues come from integrations that dealerships don’t even realize are loading sitewide.