How page speed affects a local business in search

What page speed means to Google

Google measures speed with three numbers, taken from real Chrome users on your site rather than from a lab. Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP, is how long it takes for the biggest thing on the screen, usually the hero photo or the headline, to appear. It should be under 2.5 seconds. Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS, measures how far the page jumps around while it loads, as when a button moves just as you tap it. It should be under 0.1. Interaction to Next Paint, or INP, is how long the page takes to respond after a tap, and it should be under 200 milliseconds.

Google calls a page good when all three pass and uses that as a tiebreaker among pages that answer a search equally well. A slow page with the right content will still beat a fast page with the wrong content, but among four lenders who all have a page for the same search, speed decides who lands third and who lands sixth.

The larger cost is not ranking at all. About half of visitors on a phone leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to show something, and they never see your phone number.

What a slow site looks like on a mortgage lender site

Treasure Valley Home Loans in Boise closes about 22 loans a month and gets most of its new borrowers from search and from realtor referrals who look the lender up on a phone. The site was built on a page builder with a full-width hero photo of the Boise foothills, a row of six loan officer headshots, a rates widget that pulls from a third-party feed, a chat bubble, two tracking pixels and a video background on the about page.

The hero photo was uploaded straight from the photographer at 6,000 pixels wide and 4.2 megabytes. Each headshot is 3,000 pixels wide and displayed at 200. The rates widget loads a script from another domain before it draws anything, and the page reserves no space for it, so the whole page drops by 180 pixels when the widget arrives. The chat bubble adds 11 script files.

On a phone over a cellular connection the homepage shows a white screen for about five seconds, the hero photo fades in at seven, and the rates widget then pushes everything down just as the visitor reaches for the Apply button. Search Console rates every page on the site poor under Core Web Vitals, and competitors in Meridian with plainer sites that pass sit above it for mortgage lender Boise.

A worked example: speeding up a lender site in Boise

The homepage was tested on PageSpeed Insights before and after, using the mobile result. The table shows the numbers that changed and what caused each change.

The largest gain came from one file. The 4.2 megabyte hero photo alone took longer to download on a cellular connection than the entire page does now, and resizing it to the width it is displayed at cut the biggest number on the table by two thirds. The photo is the same photo.

The layout shift fix was a single line telling the browser how tall the rates widget will be, so the space is held open before the script arrives. The chat bubble was kept but now loads its scripts when someone taps it rather than when the page opens.

The video background stayed on the about page and came off the homepage. Each change was made in the settings of the site as it stands, and the design did not change.

How to check your own page speed

1. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste in your homepage address and run the test. Read the Mobile result first, since that is what Google uses. The top section shows your three Core Web Vitals from real visitors if your site has enough traffic, and the section below it is a lab test that runs on any site.
2. Scroll down to Diagnostics. The entry that reads Properly size images lists every photo that is being sent larger than it is shown, with the wasted kilobytes for each. This list is usually the whole problem.
3. Open Google Search Console and click Core Web Vitals in the left menu. The Mobile report shows how many of your pages are rated poor, need improvement or good, and which measure is failing.
4. Open your site on your own phone over cellular data, not wifi, and count the seconds until you can read the headline. If it is more than three, the test is telling the truth.

Since Google ranks from the phone version of every site, the mobile-first indexing page covers what else Google looks at on the small screen.

What we do about page speed

You will get the three Core Web Vitals for every page on your site, a list of the photos and scripts causing each failing number, and the fixes applied in order of size, starting with the images because they are nearly always the largest share. Photos are resized and converted without being replaced, space is reserved for anything that loads late, and scripts that are not needed on first view are moved to load afterward. Each page is retested and the numbers are reported side by side with the originals. Speed is measured on every site during the audit, which is the place to start.

Questions people ask about SEO: how page speed affects a local business in search