We just released a minor update to the 4RoadService App for iOS and Android which makes searching for service in locations other than where you are much smoother. To all you safety and maintenance managers out there using 4RoadService when a driver calls, we hope this makes your life just a little bit better.
All posts by John Beales

Announcing 4RoadService 3 for Mobile
We’re excited to announce the latest generation of managing unexpected maintenance while driving over-the-road: the 4RoadService 3, now available for both Android and iOS! As a trusted companion for CDL truck drivers across the USA and Canada, the 4RoadService app has been a staple in helping drivers find the nearest truck stops, repair services, tire service, and roadside assistance. With this major update, we have added truck dealers, filtering by brand, reviews, and more.

New in 4RoadService 3
The update is packed with new features and improvements to make your life on the road smoother and more efficient:
- Sleek, Modern Design: The app has been redesigned from the ground up with a clean, user-friendly interface that’s easy on the eyes, ensuring that you can quickly access the information you need.
- One-Tap Search: Time is crucial when you’re on the road. Find the services you need with just a single tap, whether it’s roadside assistance, truck repairs, or the nearest truck stop.
- Service Ratings and Reviews: We’re bringing the power of community to the app. Read ratings and reviews from fellow truck drivers and submit your own when a service provider goes above and beyond.
- Customized Search: Find repair services and dealers that specialize in your truck’s engine, tires, or reefer.
- Seamless Sync Across Devices: Your saved favorites will now sync across all your devices and online when you sign into the app, making it easier than ever to keep track of the service providers you trust.
- Enhanced Compatibility: The app is now optimized to work better on more screen sizes, ensuring a smooth experience no matter the size of your phone.
Why 4RoadService 3?
For over 20 years, 4RoadService has been the go-to app for truckers needing facing “unscheduled maintenance” OTR. We understand that when the unexpected happens, you need reliable help fast. That’s why the app remains free and doesn’t require login for essential features—just open it up and find the help you need, no delays.
Key Features:
- Find Truck Services on the Go: Heavy diesel repair, towing and recovery services, tire repair, or reefer service, the 4RoadService app connects you to the closest providers.
- Locate Truck Stops: Major chains like Pilot Flying J, Love’s, TA Petro, and Roady’s or independent truck stops, you’ll always find a place to rest and refuel.
- Manage Your Business: Save your favorite vendors, leave reviews, and easily share vendor information with your dispatcher, maintenance manager, or drivers.




Download the App Today!
The 4RoadService 3 Mobile App is available today on Google Play for Android and the App Store for iOS. If you’re already using the app, simply update to the latest version, and you’ll be ready to hit the road!
Stay connected: Follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn for the latest updates and trucking tips.This new version is all about making your journey smoother, faster, and more reliable. We’re thrilled to bring you 4RoadService 3, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback. Safe travels!
How to tell the internet when your business changes
The internet has a long memory, so when you change something important to your business, such as your phone number, or the business name or when you move, it sometimes takes a long time for your business info to be updated everywhere. You can take control to speed up the process and make sure your business is information is correct everywhere.
In SEO, (Search Engine Optimization), terms, what you are doing is updating your “local citations,” which should all use the same Name, Address, and Phone Number, (NAP). Using consistent NAP data allows search engines can identify your business across multiple platforms and understand that you are a real business that they should show to real customers.
Update your own Website
If you have a website for your business, make sure it gets updated with the new information.
Update your Trucking Industry Listings
Contact 4RoadService and any other trucking industry directories that you are listed in to update your information. This is the fastest way to make sure the trucking industry gets updated.
Update your Business Profile with Search Engines
Search engines like Google have the concept of a Business Profile, which lets you manage your business’s contact information. Make sure to update these so they are correct.
If you have never created a business profile there is a good change that the search engines know about you anyway, and taking control of your profile lets you make sure it is correct.
The three main search engines to update are Google, Bing, and Apple, (for Apple Maps on all the iPhones in the world);
- Update your Google business profile here.
- Update your Bing business profile here.
- Update your Apple business profile here.
Update Review Platforms and Social Media
Facebook/Instagram
Facebook appears to be larger than many other review & social media platforms, so it’s critical to update your business’s Facebook page.
The Rest
There are a lot of other review and social media platforms, and which ones are most important to you depends on exactly what part of the industry you serve. Some of these review platforms also serve as data providers, (see the next section).
Some review & social sites are:
- Twitter – if you have contact data there, make sure it’s correct.
- YP/YellowPages
- Superpages
- Waze
- TomTom
- Here
Update Data Providers
There are a few large data providers that provide local business data to large parts of the internet. Updating your information with these large providers makes sure your business information is correct at the source.
It can take a while for data to flow from these providers to other websites, but it happens eventually.
Major North American Data Providers
- FourSquare – they’re no longer the social media company from 15 years ago, they’re now a local data powerhouse!
- Data Axle
The Bare Minimum
All of the above is a lot, and maybe you don’t have time to do it all. At a bare minimum update your 4RoadService listing, website, Facebook Page, and Google, Bing, and Apple profiles, and at least one of the data providers. If you do that the rest of the internet should pick up the changes… eventually.
Featuring Listing Banners in More Places
Last week we started showing Listing Banners in more place on 4RoadService.com. Banners have been shown with listings in search results for a long time, but we are now showing relevant banners at the top of search results in some cases, and on Bronze listing pages.
This should give some more visibility to our service providers who have opted for the Listing Banner upgrade for their listings. The price of the Listing Banner upgrade has not changed.

Search Banners are now Listing Banners
If you’re confused about what “Listing Banners” are, we have simply renamed the “Search Banner” upgrade, because the banners are no longer restricted to search results.
Clickable Call-to-Actions for Listings
Call-to-Action buttons are available on Gold and Platinum listings. These highly-visible tappable and clickable links are great for sending customers to online booking services or contact forms, or even your company website.
CTAs In Action
This is what the Call-to-Actions look like in real listings:


How to Add a Call to Action to your Gold or Platinum Listing
When creating a new listing or editing an existing listing, there is a section on the form called “Call-to-Action” with 2 fields:
- Call-to-Action Label: This is the text that you want to appear on the call to action. In the demos above, the client entered “Click here to submit service request” into the Label field.
- Call-to-Action URL: This is the URL, (website address), that customers should be sent to when they click or tap the CTA.
Once you have updated these two fields don’t forget to save your listing by clicking the “Create my Listing” or “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the form.
Managed Services
Managed Services are companies that organize service or repairs for you but generally do not own a shop or service vehicles, and do not do the repair themselves. Usually when you hire a Managed Service to work on your truck they will sub-contract to a mechanic close to you.
Like any purchase, using a Managed Service to repair your truck has both benefits and drawbacks.
Benefits of Managed Services
- Ease of mind: the Managed Service provider handles finding a reliable service provider for you.
- You know who to call: Many managed service providers are large, so you can call one phone number wherever you are.
- Simple Billing: You get one bill from the Managed Service provider so it’s easier to reconcile your accounting.
Drawbacks of Managed Services
- Indirect Communication: When dealing with a Managed Service provider you don’t deal with directly with the person who will fix your truck. Adding an extra layer of communication may add confusion to your repair.
- Cost: Managed Service providers generally charge the price they pay for the repair plus an additional fee.
Managed Services on 4RoadService
It is important that you can make your own choice about using Managed Services for your repairs, so they appear on 4RoadService.com with the words “Managed Service” where the address would be, and a toolbox icon where the building or truck icon appears for the provider’s location. Here’s how it looks:
Managed Service
This is what mobile providers and providers with shops look like:
Provider that only provides Mobile Repair
Provider with a location you can visit:
Tune-Up + a New Provider Center
4RoadService just completed a major under-the-hood upgrade. Most of the changes aren’t visible but will help 4RoadService improve quickly, but there are some exiting visible changes, especially for Providers.
Brand New Provider Center
After more than six years the Provider Center has been upgraded and fully integrated into the current website design. The new Provider Center faster and fully responsive so it works on computers, phones, and everything in between. There’s a new way to access the Provider Center too. You can still choose “Provider” when logging in, or the Provider Center link in your tool drawer, and now there’s a “Provider Center” link on your dashboard.

Member Dashboards for All
Yes, you have a dashboard, and if you’re a provider there’s a “Provider Center” link on your dashboard. Our login systems are now unified so everyone – Members and Providers – have a member dashboard for quick access to your recent searches and favourite Providers. If you’re a provider and think you don’t need a dashboard, try adding your listings to your favourites & save a couple of clicks when you need to update them.
Fewer, Better-Looking, E-mails
The days of plain-text E-mails from 4RoadService.com are gone. Our E-mails now look great:
If you manage multiple listings there’s even better news for you: your renewal E-mails are combined for listings that expire on the same day. No more opening your E-mail in the morning and finding a bunch of E-mails from us, there will be just one, (good-looking), E-mail when needed.

It’s Easier to Edit & Perfect Listings
For Providers, there’s an “Edit Listing” link right on your listing when you’re logged in on 4RoadService.com, and you can see your own listings while they’re under review so you can tweak them to perfection.
Upgraded Account Security
In alignment with modern password best practices we now require passwords to be at least 8 characters long – but don’t restrict yourself to eight, passwords can be as long as you want! Remember, a password is best if it’s a passphrase. Go ahead and use a whole sentence, (maybe not all of Moby Dick, though). Sentences are easier to remember, (if you’re even trying to remember them. We recommend not bothering to remember and using a password manager).
As always, please reach out if you have any questions or feedback. Enjoy the new Provider Center and your cleaner inbox!

Trucking Calendars for 2018
Happy New Year! We’re five days into 2018, do you have an awesome truck-filled calendar on your wall, (or the back of your sleeper), yet? If not, here are four eleven of our favourite trucking calendars for 2018:
Jan 10 Update: There are six more calendars that were released or we found since publishing. This is fast becoming a Super Trucking Calendar Round-Up!
Shell ROTELLA SuperRigs
Loaded with chrome, shine, and polish, the SuperRigs calendar is a classic, and the 2018 edition just became available.
Wowtrucks Calendar
Canada’s own Wowtrucks calendar is full of wow-inspiring trucks. They’ve got multi-packs with other goodies thrown in too.
2018 True North: Women in Transport Calendar
Also from Wowtrucks, the True North: Women in Transport calendar looks like it’s already sold out, maybe they can be convinced to print some more.
2018 Truck-Eating Bridge Calendar
That’s right, Davenport, Iowa’s (in)famous Truck-Eating bridge has its own calendar, and profits go to a literacy charity for local kids. You can order your copy here and hang it in the shop, truck, or wherever you need a reminder to pay attention to low bridge warnings!
Volvo Trucks 2018 Calendar
Volvo Trucks North America is offering their annual calendar. You can get yours at www.proforma.com/volvopublic.
Kenworth Twofer
Kenworth’s giving us not one, but two calendars in 2018. They have both a wall calendar and an appointment calendar available.
Mack 2018 Wall Calendar
Mack Trucks has a had a photo contest back in the springtime looking for real Mack drivers to put in their calendar. It looks like they combined winners from the contest with some product photos, (including the new Mack Anthem), for a good-looking calendar, available from the Mack Shop.
Peterbilt Twofer
Like Kenworth, Peterbilt has both an Appointment Calendar and a Wall Calendar this year, both available at www.dcgonline.net/peterbiltretail.
Midwest Peterbilt
It looks like it’s only available from the dealerships, but the Midwest Peterbilt has a calendar filled with working trucks. If you have to stop by one of the dealerships soon & like Petes, try asking about the calendar.
Are there more?
If you know of more Trucking calendars let us know @4RoadService on Twitter or on our Facebook page.
Making 4RoadService.com load faster, Smashing edition
We have always tried to make 4RoadService fast to use, and especially so since our current design came online in 2015, but “fast” is subjective, and changes over time, so when Smashing Magazineannounced their Front-End Performance Challenge at the end of October, we knew we wanted to level-up our performance, so we set to work.
Non-Technical Summary
The homepage is usable 45% sooner than it used to be, and downloads 23%* less data. The most dramatic improvement was the homepage, but the other pages we tested had improvements as well.
* This number removes the banner for the “Featured Listing” at the bottom of the homepage. It changes frequently so so including it gives us inconsistent numbers that either hide or over-emphasize the improvements on the rest of the page.
The rest of this post is more technical than anything we’ve written before, and is aimed at web developers & performance geeks. Proceed at your own risk!
Baseline
We’re optimizing for three views that are the most important to someone looking for repair service: the homepage, search results, and the listing detail page.
Page | Load Time | First Meaningful Paint | Perceptual Speed Index | Total Download Size |
---|---|---|---|---|
Homepage | 2.921s | 2,220ms | 4,154 | 380KB |
Search Results | 6.62s | 1,630ms | 5,746 | 2,080KB |
Listing Page | 2.924s | 1,590ms | 5,276 | 555KB |
Quick Wins
Being a Cloudflare customer made some things pretty quick & easy:
- We turned on WebP conversion & Lossy compression for images in Cloudflare. While this shrinks image files, it could be better:
- PNGs and Gifs are converted to lossless WebP images, (only JPEGs get lossy compression from Cloudflare). Using lossy compression would save more bandwidth.
- Only filenames ending in .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, and .img are WebP-ized, so images we manipulate on the fly with a PHP file need more trickery
- Turn on auto-minifaction of HTML, (CSS and JS are minified in our build system).
Cache Static Assets
Part 1: Assets that we create
We gave all static assets on 4RoadService.com a versioned URL using this strategy, (but not on WordPress), then set caching headers to tell browsers, (and other caches), to cache static assets for at least a year.
Part 2: User-Uploaded Assets
Repair companies with paid listings on 4RoadService can upload their company logo, a banner, and some photos. Since they don’t change at the same time as we make changes to the 4RoadService.com code they need their own versioning scheme. In our old system new versions of images didn’t get new URLs, so we changed that so whenever a new image is uploaded it gets a unique URL, and set far-future expiry headers on those as well.
Optimize the Critical Rendering Path
The Critical Rendering Path is the work the web browser does to render a web page, and it turns out we can tweak our web pages to make it happen quickly, but the “normal” way of building websites is pretty slow.
Async all the JS
When we built the current version of 4RoadService back in 2015 we made most of our Javascript asynchronous, but there’s one stats package that we just copied & pasted the code for. It turned out it was loading slowly and blocking rendering. Adding an
async
attribute to the script tag cleared that up and shaved 200ms off the time it took to reach the DOMContentLoaded event.
HTTP/2 Server Push things that block rendering, (hint: it’s styles)
The next biggest blocker to our CRP being speedy was our main CSS file. Even with HTTP/2’s multiplexing, there was still a period of time between when we started sending the HTML and when the browser requested the CSS file. HTTP/2 Server Push to the rescue!
HTTP/2 Server Push is fantastically simple to set up. If the web server supports it all that’s needed is adding a HTTP response header and the web server handles the rest for you. While it helped our rendering time, the difference wasn’t as dramatic as we had hoped, but it was an incremental improvement of 50-100ms.
We also tried HTTP/2 Server Pushing our main Javascript file, but since it was already loading asynchronously it didn’t help, and possibly harmed, the load speed.
Status Check
Everything discussed up to this point improved the DOMContentLoaded event, and Lighthouse‘s First Meaningful Paint, First Interactive, and Consistently Interactive values but about a second. Depending on the page that’s loading that’s a 15% to 33% improvement. Not bad!
What Remains
Once the browser starts receiving the web page the first several steps now progress very quickly. Most room for improvement still exists at both ends of the page load: our time-to-first-byte could be improved, (it’s just under 1/2 second), and on some pages there are large images that take a while to finish loading, (this is especially true on very large screens). To tackle these problems we can make our resized-on-the-fly images, (user-uploaded images), cacheable, and WebP-able, by Cloudflare, optimize our source images better, and speed up our server code. Because of the deadline on the Smashing Magazine challenge we focused on the first two.
What doesn’t seem worth doing (right now)
Heading into the challenge we thought we would be breaking up our monolithic stylesheet file, and some of our concatenated Javascript, to take advantage of HTTP/2’s parallel downloads, but the stylesheet is relatively fast right now, and the Javascript comes in late, and is relatively fast, so there are bigger gains to be found elsewhere. We feel like there’s about 100ms to be gained here, and will revisit it in the future.
We could also break up our styles by media query and use several <link> tags with different media attributes. When a browser encounters a <link> to a stylesheet with a media query that’s not applicable it doesn’t block rendering for that file, so there may be gains, especially for people on mobile devices, however because the styles are fairly quick, and we would have to make guesses about which CSS files to send with a HTTP/2 Push, we’ll explore this later.
Optimize Those Last Few Images
Remember how we thought using lossy WebP would improve the download size of some images? Cloudinary’s Website Speed Test says that the gains could be big, especially for large PNGs like the orange truck on our homepage. Since the large images were taking 5-7 seconds to finish downloading on a very large screen we went ahead and optimized these in 2 steps.
Step 1: Optimize non-WebP images
Our build process already compresses our images, but we can do better. By tweaking the algorithms used for image optimization, then waiting forever while they run, (ahem, Guetzli), we shrunk the file sizes for everyone who can’t accept WebP images.
Step 2: Lossy WebP, and special URLs
We also added a step to our build process to create lossy WebP versions of every image. The size differences are incredible, for example, for the largest version of the orange truck on our homepage, the unoptimized PNG is 4.2MB, the optimized PNG is 1.1MB, and the WebP is 244KB. If you can use Lossy WebP, do.
These magical WebP images cause a problem, though: Not all browsers understand them. We could solve that by serving a WebP image if the browser sends images/web in its Accept HTTP header, but since CloudFlare caches our images it would cache the WebP version of a file and serve it to non-WebP-capable browsers, so we have to have separate URLs for WebP images, which means some image URLs change if the browser sends an image/webp Accept header. Once that happens both our optimized non-WebP images and our tiny, lossy, WebP images are cached in Cloudflare’s CDN for ultimate image speed.
Step 3: Compress user-supplied images as much as possible
Compressing the user-supplied images is more tricky. We resize some of them on-the-fly in PHP, and the compression tools in PHP don’t seem to be as good as the tools we use in our node-based build process. However, we can take advantage of Cloudflare’s compression. Yes, it’s not as good as the lossy WebP images we’re serving for our own assets, but it’s better than nothing. There was a hurdle, where Cloudflare doesn’t apply image compression to URLs ending in .php, so we re-wrote the URLs to look like image files and Cloudflare started compressing them for us. Problem solved-ish.
Next Steps
This is all we had time to do before the deadline for the challenge, but we have identified a few things to keep working on:
- Improve our time-to-first-byte: We’re working on one thing that should improve this a lot. There may also be ways to improve it by caching more, but some of our pages are customized for logged-in users, so we’ll have to work on caching pages while keeping customizations for logged-in users.
- Improve compression of user-provided images: We need to spend some time researching PHP compression systems.
- Resource Hints: We can tell the browser what outside services we’re going to connect to in HTTP headers, then it can get started on the connection without waiting to parse the HTML.
- Break up CSS and JS: This time around we decided there are bigger fish to try than breaking up our CSS & JS files to take advantage of HTTP/2’s parallelization, but doing this should yield a small reduction in load time.
- Service Workers, and Progressive-Web-App-izing 4RoadService: Some of 4RoadService relies on getting accurate, fresh, data from the server, but some things can be sped up with Service Workers and locally-cached data.
Conclusion
That’s as much as we snuck in under Smashing Magazine’s deadline. So, how did we do?
Page | Load Time | First Meaningful Paint | Perceptual Speed Index | Total Download Size |
---|---|---|---|---|
Homepage | 1.765s (-39%) |
1,290ms (-42%) |
1,816 (-56%) |
220KB (-42%) |
Search Results | 4.255s (-36%) |
1,480ms (-9%) |
4,781 (-17%) |
808KB (-61%) |
Listing Page | 2.117s (-27%) |
1,480ms (-7%) |
4,361 (-17%) |
438KB (-21%) |
That’s not too bad. This effort took less than half a week of developer time and produced very real improvements to our page load times, and reductions to the number of bytes we’re sending to our largely-mobile audience. In addition we have identified things that we can keep improving. Participating in the Smashing Magazine Front-End Performance challenge was a worthwhile exercise, not just to bring our skills up to speed on some new front-end performance practises, but to improve the experience of people using 4RoadService and let them find help quickly.

Keeping 4RoadService Apps Fresh on your Phone
Some, (actually, most) people prefer native apps over a great mobile website, so it’s time to shine the light on the 4RoadService Breakdown Directory Mobile Apps.
Android
Android devices are the mobile workhorse of the trucking industry, and while we would prefer you’re rolling instead of looking up repair vendors, when you do need some truck repairs 4RoadService for Android is there.
Recent Android highlights include:
- 12 updates in 2016, and we’ve already released an update in 2017.
- Maps of search results
- Error Reporting and Vendor Suggestions from within the app, (and thanks to anyone that submitted reports or suggestions – you rock!)
- Lots of error fixes, because the last thing you need is a broken app when you’ve got a broken truck.
iPhone
Apple seems to rule the world, so it’s only appropriate to have a world-ruling iPhone app. That’s why 4RoadService for iPhone, (the original Truck Repair Locator in the App Store), got a complete rewrite in 2016, just in time for Christmas, with some snazzy new features:
- Find truck service near you with one tap and your phone’s GPS.
- Save your favourite repair companies to your phone.
- Report problems & suggest new repair shops from within the app.
- See repair shops on a map.
While both our Android and iOS apps are great, there’s so much more that we can, and will do with them. Keep your auto-update turned on and check the release notes to keep up with the latest tricks we add to your phone.