Website Speed and Core Web Vitals: Why Every Second Counts

Imagine a shop where you have to wait five seconds for the door to open. Most people would turn around and leave — and that's exactly what happens every day on slow websites. Google's research shows that the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by more than 30% as load time goes from one to three seconds.

Speed is no longer a technical detail that only developers care about. It directly affects search rankings, enquiries and sales.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are three metrics Google uses to measure the real user experience on your website. The data is collected from actual visitors via the Chrome browser and is part of Google's ranking signals.

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — how quickly the main content appears. Target: under 2.5 seconds.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — how quickly the page responds to a click or tap. Target: under 200 milliseconds.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — how much content “jumps around” while loading. Target: under 0.1.

Why speed matters for business

A fast website isn't just more pleasant — it delivers measurable results. Visitors view more pages, stay longer and are more likely to send an enquiry or complete a purchase. For online stores the difference is especially visible: every tenth of a second can affect the conversion rate.

On top of that, Google doesn't want to send users to slow pages. When two sites are equally relevant, the faster one has the edge.

The most common reasons a website is slow

When we audit websites that come to us for improvements, we almost always find the same culprits:

• Unoptimised images — multi-megabyte photos straight from a phone or camera.
• Too many plugins, each loading its own scripts on every page.
• Bloated themes and page builders that generate a lot of unnecessary code.
• Cheap shared hosting with a slow server.
• Third-party scripts: chat widgets, tracking pixels, embedded videos.
• Fonts loaded from several sources that block text from rendering.

How to speed up your website

Some steps are quick and cheap, others require more serious changes. Start with the ones that have the biggest impact:

• Convert images to WebP or AVIF and serve them at the size the screen actually needs.
• Enable lazy loading for images and video below the first screen.
• Remove plugins you don't use and replace heavy ones with lighter alternatives.
• Use a CDN so content is delivered from the server closest to the visitor.
• Defer scripts that aren't needed for the first render.
• Reserve space for images and embeds so content doesn't shift (CLS).

How we build fast websites

We build our websites with modern technologies such as Next.js, which pre-render pages as static HTML. That means the server doesn't have to “compute” anything when someone opens a page — it's delivered almost instantly from the nearest server. Images are automatically optimised for every device and fonts are self-hosted.

The result is websites that load in under a second and regularly score above 90 in PageSpeed Insights.

Check your website in two minutes

Open PageSpeed Insights, enter your website address and look at the mobile results. If your score is below 50 or any Core Web Vitals metric is red, your site is probably losing visitors every day.

Send us the link — we'll analyse the results for free and tell you exactly what needs fixing.