Speed is a sales tool: why your website load time matters
Customers decide in seconds, usually on a phone. Here is how Google measures website speed and the quick wins that make the biggest difference.
Most people looking for a local business are on a phone, often on a spotty connection, and they are not patient. If your website takes too long to show up, or the buttons lag when they tap, they hit back and call the next business on the list.
How Google measures speed
Google uses a set of measurements called Core Web Vitals to judge how a page feels to real visitors. There are three:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long it takes for the main content to show up. Google's target is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. INP officially replaced the older First Input Delay measure in March 2024, and a good score is under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while it loads. The target is 0.1 or less.
Google looks at these for at least 75 percent of real visits, so a site that is fast on your office computer but slow on a customer's phone still falls short.
What slows most small business sites down
- Heavy page builders. Drag and drop builders are convenient, but they add a lot of code to every page.
- Too many add-ons. Each plugin, chat bubble, popup and tracking script adds weight and another thing that can break.
- Huge images. A photo straight off a camera can be many times larger than it needs to be.
- Slow, shared hosting. Bargain hosting often means your site waits in line behind hundreds of others.
Quick wins you can ask for
- Resize and compress images and serve modern formats like WebP.
- Remove what you do not use: old plugins, duplicate tracking codes and widgets nobody clicks.
- Load fonts and scripts efficiently, and avoid loading things a page does not need.
- Test on a phone. Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool shows your Core Web Vitals and what to fix.
How we build for speed
Every Boost website is hand built with only what it needs: optimized images, efficient code, self hosted fonts and fast hosting, with no pile of plugins. The result is a site that loads quickly on any phone and keeps working, which means more calls, more bookings and fewer lost customers.