Google measures how fast and stable your pages feel to real users. Those measurements — the Core Web Vitals — influence rankings and, even more, whether visitors stay long enough to become customers.
The Three Metrics That Matter
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long the main content takes to appear. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds to clicks and taps. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the layout jumps while loading. Aim for under 0.1.
Why Speed Affects Revenue
Slow pages lose visitors before they read your offer, especially on mobile networks. A faster site usually means more form submissions and calls from the same traffic.
Common Causes of a Slow Website
- Large, uncompressed images and videos.
- Too many plugins loading CSS and JavaScript on every page.
- Cheap shared hosting without caching.
- Third-party scripts such as chat widgets and trackers.
Practical Fixes
- Convert images to WebP or AVIF and size them correctly.
- Enable page caching and a CDN.
- Remove unused plugins and load scripts only where needed.
- Delay non-essential scripts until the user interacts.
- Reserve space for images and banners to prevent layout shifts.
How to Measure Your Site
Use Google PageSpeed Insights for a quick report and the Core Web Vitals section in Search Console to see how real users experience your pages.
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