Why website speed matters, and how to get it right

Most of your visitors will arrive on a phone, often on a patchy mobile signal. If the page is slow to appear, or jumps around while it loads, many of them simply go back and tap the next result. Speed is one of the easiest ways to stand out from competitors, because a lot of small business websites are surprisingly slow.

What Google measures: Core Web Vitals

Google uses three measurements, called Core Web Vitals, to judge how a page feels to real visitors. The "good" thresholds Google publishes are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), 2.5 seconds or less: how long until the main content, usually the headline or main photo, has appeared.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP), 200 milliseconds or less: how quickly the page responds when someone taps a button or opens a menu.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), 0.1 or less: how much the page jumps about while loading, which causes mis-taps.

Google collects these from real Chrome users. You can see your site's figures in Google Search Console, or test any page with PageSpeed Insights. Speed is one of many things Google considers, and it won't lift a weak page above a much better one, but between similar pages a fast, stable one has the edge, and it keeps more of the visitors you've already won.

What usually slows a small site down

• Huge photos uploaded straight from a phone or camera, often several megabytes each.
• Too many plugins and scripts: chat widgets, sliders, trackers and page builders each add weight.
• Cheap shared hosting on a single server far from your visitors.
• Pages built on every visit by a database, instead of being ready to send.

How we keep sites fast

We build static websites: every page is ready before anyone asks for it, and it is served from Cloudflare's network close to each visitor. Photos are resized and compressed, there are no heavy page builders, and space is reserved for images so nothing jumps. Our own pages score 100 for performance in Google's Lighthouse test on mobile settings.

Want to know how your current site does? Run it through our free SEO checker, which includes a speed test, or see what's included with our hosting.

Got more questions? See our Speed, safety & security FAQs or the £350 website package.

Last reviewed 2026-10-30 by the IceWork team.