Have you ever wondered if your website is up to speed (both figuratively and literally)? Think about it: most businesses spend thousands of dollars to create and maintain an online home where customers can find exactly what they're looking for.
Did you know that most people will leave a website if they can't find what they're looking for within a few seconds?
What about your website? Can people easily navigate and find what they need on both a laptop and a mobile device? And just as important: how quickly does your site load on both?
A Slow Site Loses Customers
According to Google's research, more than half of mobile visitors will leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. Speed isn't just a nice-to-have anymore. Google uses page experience as a ranking factor, so a slow site can cost you both visitors and search visibility. The good news is that Google gives you a free tool to see exactly where your site stands and what to fix.
Test Your Site with PageSpeed Insights
Google's go-to tool for this is PageSpeed Insights. (It replaced the older "Test My Site" and Mobile-Friendly Test tools, which Google has since retired.) Just enter your URL, and it analyzes your page on both mobile and desktop, then gives you a performance score from 0 to 100 along with specific recommendations.
PageSpeed Insights shows you two kinds of data:
- Field data: how real Chrome users have actually experienced your page over the past 28 days. This is the data Google uses for ranking.
- Lab data: a simulated test run in a controlled environment, useful for diagnosing issues and reproducing problems.
A score of 90 or above (green) is good, 50 to 89 (orange) needs improvement, and below 50 (red) is poor. But the score is only part of the picture. The metrics that matter most are your Core Web Vitals.
Understand Your Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are the three metrics Google uses to measure real-world page experience, and they're a confirmed ranking signal:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading, or how long it takes for the main content to appear. Aim for 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures responsiveness, or how quickly your page reacts when someone clicks or taps. Aim for 200 milliseconds or less. (INP replaced the older First Input Delay metric in 2024.)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability, or how much the page jumps around as it loads. Aim for 0.1 or less.
Your page passes the Core Web Vitals assessment when all three are in the "good" range for most of your real visitors.
The Areas PageSpeed Insights Tells You to Improve
Below your scores, PageSpeed Insights lists specific opportunities and diagnostics, the concrete changes that will speed up your site. Common ones include:
- Reduce initial server response time
- Eliminate render-blocking resources (JavaScript and CSS)
- Properly size images and serve them in next-gen formats
- Reduce unused JavaScript and CSS
- Lazy-load offscreen images
- Enable text compression
- Efficiently cache static assets
- Minify CSS and JavaScript
- Avoid large layout shifts
- Avoid multiple page redirects
Each item shows the estimated time savings, so you can prioritize the changes that will make the biggest difference. Many of these are technical, but a good developer or marketing team can knock them out fairly quickly.
For an ongoing, site-wide view rather than a single page, the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console groups all your URLs by status so you can track problems across your whole site over time.
When it comes to your website, don't assume that just because you built it, they will come. It's important to consistently check that your site is performing the way it should. We're here to help you build, optimize, and maintain a fast, search-friendly website so customers can find you. Let us handle the technical side so you can focus on what you do best.
This is part of our guide to marketing your small business online.
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