Your website can look beautiful and still lose customers if it feels slow or jumpy. Google measures this with three metrics called Core Web Vitals. They affect user experience directly and are part of how Google evaluates pages. Here's what each one means without the jargon.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how fast does the main content appear?
LCP measures how long it takes for the biggest thing on the screen, usually a hero image or headline, to show up. Google considers 2.5 seconds or less to be good.
Common causes of slow LCP: huge images, slow hosting, and too much code loading before the page can display anything.
How to improve it: serve images in modern formats like WebP or AVIF at the right size, use a good host or CDN, and load the most important content first.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): does the page respond when I tap?
INP measures how quickly your page reacts when someone taps a button, opens a menu or types in a form. Google considers 200 milliseconds or less to be good.
Common causes of poor INP: heavy JavaScript, too many third-party scripts (chat widgets, trackers, pop-ups) and bloated themes.
How to improve it: remove scripts you don't need, delay non-essential ones until after the page loads, and choose lightweight themes and plugins.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): does the page jump around?
CLS measures how much things move unexpectedly while the page loads, like when you go to tap a button and an image pushes it down. Google considers 0.1 or less to be good.
Common causes of high CLS: images without set dimensions, ads or banners that load late, and fonts that swap and change size.
How to improve it: give images and videos fixed dimensions, reserve space for anything that loads late, and load fonts carefully.
How to check your site
- Go to PageSpeed Insights and enter your URL. Look at the mobile results first.
- In Google Search Console, open the Core Web Vitals report to see which pages need work.
- Test on a real mid-range phone over mobile data. That's how many of your customers will experience your site.
Why it matters for your business
Faster sites are more pleasant to use, and people who enjoy using your site are more likely to stay, explore and enquire. Speed improvements also tend to make every other marketing channel work better, because every ad click and search visit lands on a page that's ready.
We build every site mobile-first with these metrics in mind from day one. If your current site is struggling, a focused speed audit is often one of the highest-return fixes you can make.
Questions people ask
Why is my website so slow?
The most common causes are large images, too many plugins or scripts, heavy sliders and videos, and cheap or overloaded hosting.
What are Core Web Vitals?
They're Google's three measures of how a page feels to use: how fast the main content loads (LCP), how quickly it responds to taps (INP), and how stable the layout is (CLS).
Does website speed affect Google rankings?
Yes, as one signal among many. Speed matters even more for visitors, since slow pages lose people before they see your offer.