Picture someone in Vallejo with a flat tire on a Saturday morning. They search on their phone, tap the first shop that looks right and wait. If the page sits blank, or jumps around while it loads, they go back and tap the next one. You never know they were there.
Speed isn't a technical detail. It's the first impression of your business for everyone who finds you on a phone, and it's one of the easier things to measure and fix. Google has also said that page experience, which includes speed, is one of the many things its ranking systems consider, though it rarely outweighs a page that answers the search better.
How to check your speed
- Go to pagespeed.web.dev, Google's PageSpeed Insights, and enter your home page address.
- Look at the Mobile results first. Most local searches happen on phones, and mobile results are usually the worse of the two.
- If you see a section about what real users are experiencing, that's data from Chrome users who visited your site. Small sites often don't have enough visitors for it to appear, which is normal.
- The performance score from 0 to 100 comes from a lab test. The bands are 0 to 49 poor, 50 to 89 needs improvement and 90 to 100 good. Treat it as a guide to what to fix, not a grade.
- Test your most important service page and your contact page too, not just the home page.
The three numbers that matter
Google measures page experience with three numbers it calls Core Web Vitals:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long until the main thing on the page, usually the big photo or headline, appears. Google counts 2.5 seconds or less as good.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps a button or opens a menu. 200 milliseconds or less is good.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while it loads. 0.1 or less is good. This is the one that makes people tap the wrong thing.
The most common speed killers
- Huge images. A photo straight off a phone can be several megabytes. Resize it to the size it actually shows on screen and save it in a modern format like WebP. Most photos on a small business site can be well under 200KB.
- Background video. We found this one on our own site. Two looping videos further down the home page were downloading on the first visit even though they were set not to preload, because autoplay overrides that setting. Our first load went from about a quarter of a megabyte to nearly three and a half. Loading the videos only when someone scrolls near them fixed it.
- Too many plugins and scripts. Chat widgets, review widgets, tracking pixels, page builders and sliders all add code. Each seems small. Together they slow every page. Remove anything you don't use.
- Slow hosting. If the server takes a long time to answer, nothing else helps much. A content delivery network (CDN) serves your files from servers close to your visitors.
- Fonts and pop-ups. Several font families, or a pop-up that covers the page on arrival, both delay the moment someone can read and tap.
What to fix first
- Resize and compress the images on your home page and top service pages.
- Remove plugins, widgets and tracking scripts nobody uses.
- Make sure the main image at the top of the page loads first and isn't set to lazy-load.
- Give images and embeds a fixed size so the page doesn't jump while it loads.
- Run the test again and compare.
If you're on a website builder, many of these settings are controlled by the platform, and the biggest lever you have is image size. If you're on WordPress, a caching plugin and an image compression plugin cover a lot of ground. A custom-built site can fix all of it.
Mistakes to avoid
- Chasing a perfect score on the desktop results while the mobile page is still slow.
- Testing only on office Wi-Fi with a new phone. Your customers may be on an older phone in a parking lot.
- Adding a speed plugin on top of a heavy theme. It helps a little, but the theme is the problem.
- Forgetting the contact page. It matters most, and it's the page most often weighed down by map embeds and form scripts.
What we do
Every site we build is checked against Core Web Vitals before launch, on a phone-sized screen as well as a desktop. If your current site feels slow, our free website audit checks performance along with SEO and local search signals, and lists what to fix first.
We do this for clients: Web design and development.