A slow website quietly costs you customers every day. When pages take more than a few seconds to load, many visitors leave before they ever see what you offer. Speed also shapes how Google ranks you.
How Google measures speed: Core Web Vitals
Google uses three Core Web Vitals to judge the experience your pages give real visitors:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the main content appears. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while loading. Aim for under 0.1.
You can check your scores for free with Google PageSpeed Insights or in Google Search Console.
The most common causes of a slow website
- Oversized images. Photos uploaded straight from a camera or phone can be several megabytes each.
- Too many plugins and scripts. Every slider, chat widget and tracking script adds weight.
- Cheap, overloaded hosting. Shared servers can struggle when traffic grows.
- Heavy page builders and themes. Many generic themes load code for features you never use.
Quick wins you can make today
- Compress images and serve modern formats like WebP or AVIF.
- Remove plugins and third-party scripts you no longer need.
- Lazy-load images and videos further down the page.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) so pages are served from close to your visitors.
The long-term fix: build for speed from the start
The fastest websites are designed for performance from day one. Modern static-site frameworks send visitors plain, pre-built HTML with very little JavaScript, which is ideal for most business websites.
If your website feels sluggish, get in touch for a free speed review. We’ll tell you what’s slowing it down and how to fix it.