Loading speed (Core Web Vitals)

For a very long time, website speed didn’t matter very much. As long as the content was good and had some backlinks, it was going to rank well. However, over the past couple of years, search engines have put a massive emphasis on user experience, and the loading speed of a website is a major part of that.

These days, if a website loads slowly, users are much more likely to click out of it and go to another website. 47 percent of consumers expect a website to load in no more than two seconds. when your page load time increases from one second to three seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 32 percent. If it rises from one to five seconds, that probability increases 90 percent!

Since page rankings are largely determined by user interactions, if a page is loading slowly, there’s a great chance it’s not ranking as high as it would if it loaded quickly.

Recently, Google has even stated that page speed is a ranking factor, and they’ve been releasing tools to help website owners measure and optimize their website speed.

If the concept of website speed seems overwhelming to you, it’s fortunately pretty easy to understand and break down. We’re going to use a tool called Pagespeed Insights by Google.

This tool literally lets us look at a page’s speed how Google sees it. Any other tool isn’t worth using, because they may view things differently from how Google sees it.

When you put a URL into PageSpeed Insights, you’ll get a speed score along with a bunch of other metrics. Of course the goal is to have as high of a speed score as possible, but the other metrics need to be looked at as well.

Scrolling down, there’s two sections. The first is Field Data, and the second is Lab Data. Field data is data collected from real users visiting your site, while Lab data is data collected in a controlled environment with predefined device and network settings.

While all metrics are important, we want to look in Field Data (for real life performance) for what Google calls our Core Web Vitals. Specifically, those are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

LCP marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded, AKA when a website is readable.

FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing the interaction.

CLS quantifies how often users experience unexpected layout shifts, or elements on a page moving from one spot to another.

These are considered core vitals because a website that has all three of these is stable, usable, and useful — all great for the user experience.

Now here’s the thing with page speed. When I’m looking for a website, I particularly look for one that has a poor speed score. Improving the score a decent amount is actually quite easy if the previous owner didn’t worry about speed optimization, and significant speed gains usually result in massive traffic gains almost immediately.

Older websites are particularly good for this since they’re typically using outdated technology.