WEB DESIGN · · 6 min read
Website speed for business owners: Core Web Vitals in plain English
Slow sites lose visitors and rankings. What Google’s three speed metrics mean, how to check yours, and the fixes that make the biggest difference.
Ally · Lead Developer
Why speed matters
A slow website costs you twice. People leave before the page loads, and Google uses page experience as one of the signals behind its rankings. Most visitors are on their phone, often on a patchy connection, so a site that feels quick on your office Wi-Fi might be frustrating out in the real world.
Google measures this with a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals. They sound technical, but each one maps to something a visitor genuinely feels.
The three metrics
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long the main content, usually the hero image or headline, takes to appear. Aim for 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Aim for 200 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much the page jumps around while loading. Aim for 0.1 or less. You know the feeling: you go to tap a button and something loads above it, pushing it down.
How to check your site
Go to Google's PageSpeed Insights and enter your website address. If your site gets enough traffic, you'll see real-world data from Chrome users at the top. Below that is a lab test with specific recommendations. Check your key pages on mobile, not just the homepage.
Google Search Console also has a Core Web Vitals report that groups your pages by status, which is handy for spotting problems across a whole site.
The usual culprits
- Huge images. A photo straight off a camera can be several megabytes. Resize images to the size they're displayed and use modern formats like WebP or AVIF.
- Too many scripts. Chat widgets, tracking pixels, booking embeds and pop-ups all add weight.
- Heavy fonts. Loading lots of weights and styles slows things down.
- Bloated themes and plugins, especially on WordPress.
- Images and embeds without set dimensions, which shift the layout as they load.
- Cheap or overloaded hosting.
Quick wins
- Compress and resize every image on your key pages
- Lazy load images further down the page, but not the hero image
- Remove unused plugins, apps and tracking scripts
- Delay non-essential scripts like chat widgets until after the page loads
- Give images and video embeds fixed dimensions
When it's the platform
Sometimes the problem is baked into how a site was built. If you've done the quick wins and your scores are still poor, a rebuild on a faster foundation can be the better investment. Modern platforms like Framer, and custom builds on infrastructure like Vercel, are designed to perform well out of the box.
Speed isn't everything
A fast site with confusing content still won't convert. Treat speed as the foundation. It gets people through the door, then your design and copy do the rest.
Want to know how your site performs? Book a call and we'll run through your Core Web Vitals and the fixes that matter most.
Book a 20 minute call
WRITTEN BY
Ally · Lead Developer
Builds fast, solid sites and software across custom code, Framer, Squarespace, WordPress and Shopify.