Think of the last time you opened a page on your phone and the screen stayed blank. How many seconds did you wait before going back? Your visitors do exactly the same, and they don't tell you why they never got in touch.
Speed isn't only a technical matter. It affects how many people see the page to the end, how many contact you, and it's one of the signals Google takes into account. The good news: you don't need to be a developer to understand it.
The three numbers Google measures
Google calls them Core Web Vitals. The names sound technical, but each one measures something every visitor feels:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how quickly the main content appears. Usually the headline or the big image. Google considers it good when it happens within 2.5 seconds.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how quickly the page reacts when you tap it. You press a button and nothing happens for a moment? That's INP. Good: under 200 milliseconds.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how much the page "jumps" while loading. You go to tap a link, an image loads above it and you tap something else. Good: under 0.1.
Google assesses these from real visitors' experience, across 75% of visits. So it isn't enough for the site to be fast on your office computer; it has to be fast on your customer's phone, on their connection.
How to measure it for free in 2 minutes
- Open PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and enter your site's address.
- Look at the top section, "Discover what your real users are experiencing". That's data from real visitors, if the site has enough traffic.
- The section below, with a score from 0 to 100, is a simulated test on a slow phone. Useful for finding problems, but don't panic about the number: it isn't the same as real experience.
Lab scores (say 60 out of 100) and real-user data often differ. A site with lots of animation can score low in the test and still load fast for real visitors. Base decisions mainly on the real-user data.
The 6 most common causes of a slow site
- Images that are too heavy. A photo straight from a phone or camera can be several megabytes. On the web it should be much smaller, in formats like WebP or AVIF, and at the size it's displayed.
- Too many plugins or scripts. Every add-on (chat, stats, sliders, effects) adds code the phone has to download and run.
- Cheap, overloaded hosting. The server responds slowly before anything else can start.
- "Does everything" themes. Some WordPress themes load features you'll never use.
- Too many fonts. Four font families, each in five weights, is too many.
- Autoplaying video at the top of the page, especially on phones.
What you can do yourself today
- Shrink images before uploading them (there are free online tools for this).
- Deactivate plugins you no longer use.
- Remove the slider at the top unless there's a strong reason for it. One good image and a clear headline usually work better.
- Check the site on your own phone over mobile data, not on the office Wi-Fi.
When you need help
If the site is still slow after all that, the problem usually goes deeper: the theme, the hosting or the way the site was built. Sometimes it can be fixed with optimisation; sometimes it's one of the signs that the site needs rebuilding.
Speed optimisation is part of our website packages and our monthly maintenance.
Want to know why your site is slow?
Send us the link and we'll tell you the three main causes and what a fix would cost.
Check my speed →