What Google measures
Google looks at three numbers it calls Core Web Vitals. They describe what real visitors experience, and Google publishes a "good" threshold for each one, measured at the 75th percentile of visits (source: web.dev, Web Vitals).
| Metric | What it means | "Good" threshold |
|---|---|---|
| LCP: Largest Contentful Paint | How quickly the main content (often the hero image or headline) appears | 2.5 seconds or less |
| INP: Interaction to Next Paint | How quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks | 200 milliseconds or less |
| CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift | How much the page jumps around while loading | 0.1 or less |
To check your own site, put your address into PageSpeed Insights. If enough people visit your site, it shows real data from Chrome users. If not, you get a lab test, which is still a useful guide.
Why is my website slow? The usual suspects
Photos straight from the camera
One of the most common problems on small-business sites is oversized images. A photo from a modern phone can be several megabytes. Upload it as it is, show it in a box a few hundred pixels wide, and every visitor still downloads the whole thing. Resize photos to the size they're shown at, compress them, and use WebP or AVIF.
Too many add-ons
Chat widgets, sliders, pop-ups, tracking scripts, plugins nobody remembers installing. Each one is code a phone has to download and run before the page feels usable. For every add-on, I'd ask one question: does this help someone call or book? If not, remove it.
Themes built to do everything
Multi-purpose themes ship code for features you'll never use, like portfolio grids and animation libraries. You pay for all of it in load time. A lean custom build only sends what the site actually uses.
Fonts loaded the slow way
Several font families in several weights, pulled from someone else's server, will hold up your text and make it jump when the fonts finally arrive. One or two families, hosted on your own site, is plenty.
Pages that jump around
You go to tap a button, the page shifts, and you hit something else. That's layout shift. It usually comes from images or banners that load without a reserved space. Giving every image a width and height goes a long way.
Fancy effects on modest phones
Some visual effects, like heavy background blurs, look lovely on a new laptop and make scrolling sluggish on an older phone. Use them sparingly, or switch them off on mobile.
Cheap hosting with no caching
If the server is slow, everything is slow. For a simple business site, static pages served from a CDN are often both the fastest and the cheapest setup.
Does speed affect your Google ranking?
Page experience is one of many signals Google uses. Speed on its own won't lift a thin page to the top. But a slow page loses people before they ever call, and you pay for that whether or not your ranking moves.
Where I'd start
Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and your most important service page, using the mobile setting. If LCP is well over 2.5 seconds, or the page jumps as it loads, it's worth fixing. My speed and mobile service starts with a check and a fixed price before any work begins.