Speed is a ranking signal, not a nice-to-have
Google has treated page experience as a ranking factor for years, and load speed sits at the centre of it. Two sites with near-identical content will not rank identically if one becomes usable in three seconds and the other in one.
The practical takeaway: treat speed as a ranking input, not an afterthought you optimise after launch.
The three numbers that matter
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — how long until the main content is visible. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — how quickly the page responds to a tap or click. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — how much the layout jumps while loading. Aim for under 0.1.
You can measure all three for free in PageSpeed Insights, and real-user data sits in the Core Web Vitals report inside Search Console.
Where the weight usually hides
Most slow sites are slow for the same handful of reasons:
- Unoptimised hero images — a 4MB photograph where a 180KB WebP would look identical.
- Third-party scripts loading before your own content.
- Fonts requested from three different sources.
- A page builder stacking plugins that each pull in their own stylesheet.
What we do first on every build
We start by compressing and resizing every image to the exact size it renders, then lazy-load anything below the fold. After that we defer non-critical scripts and self-host the fonts.
Speed work is rarely glamorous, but it is the cheapest conversion improvement most businesses will ever make.
The compounding effect
Faster pages rank better, convert better, and cost less to advertise on. Fix the foundation once and every campaign you run afterwards starts from a stronger position.