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Speed Is a Feature
Core Web Vitals, translated: the three numbers Google uses to judge your site, what they mean in plain English, and why slow pages quietly cost you work.
FAST.
Measured, not hoped
Nobody has ever recommended a business because its website loaded quickly. But plenty of people have given up on one because it didn't.
Speed is invisible when it's good and unmissable when it's bad. Visitors don't consciously reward a fast site; they just stay, read, and enquire. On a slow one they leave, usually before you ever know they arrived. Google formalised this into three measurements called Core Web Vitals, and they're worth understanding in plain English.
The three numbers
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long until the main content is visible. Target: under 2.5 seconds
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page reacts when someone taps or clicks. Target: under 200 milliseconds
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while loading. Target: under 0.1
In other words: does it show up fast, does it respond fast, and does it hold still. Google measures these from real visitors, mostly on mid-range phones over mobile connections, not on the fast office machine where the site was signed off.
Why it affects your ranking
Core Web Vitals feed into Google's ranking systems as part of its page experience signals. Speed alone won't outrank better content, but between comparable pages, the faster one has the edge. And speed compounds with everything else: fast pages keep visitors longer, convert more of them, and waste less of your marketing spend on people who bounce before the page appears.
What usually makes sites slow
Images uploaded at full camera resolution and scaled down in the browser
JavaScript doing work no visitor asked for
Third-party scripts (chat widgets, trackers, embeds), each adding their own delay
Hosting that responds slowly before your page even starts loading
The fixes are unglamorous
Most performance work is housekeeping: compress and resize images, serve modern formats, remove scripts nobody uses, cache what doesn't change, choose hosting that responds quickly. None of it is exotic. It just has to actually be done, and then measured, because guessing about performance is how sites end up slow in the first place.
Measure, don't assume
Run your site through PageSpeed Insights and look at the field data, the section based on real visitor measurements. Test on a phone over mobile data, not just the office wifi. If the numbers are green, keep them that way. If they're not, the list above is where the problem almost always lives.
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