Website speed and Google rankings: what you need to know

Why speed matters

A visitor staring at a blank page often leaves before it loads, especially on a phone. Speed therefore directly affects the number of enquiries and sales.

Google takes page experience into account in its rankings. Speed does not replace good content, but with comparable content, a fast site has an edge.

What Core Web Vitals measure

Google sums up a page’s experience with three metrics:

• LCP: how long the largest visible element takes to appear, often the main image or heading
• INP: how responsive the page is when you click or type
• CLS: visual stability, meaning no elements jumping around while loading

The most effective levers

A few technical choices make most of the difference:

• images in the right format (WebP, AVIF) and size
• pages generated ahead of time instead of computed on every visit
• hosting on a network close to visitors (CDN)
• fonts and scripts loaded sparingly
• reserved image dimensions to avoid layout shifts

Animation and speed can coexist

An animated site is not necessarily slow. Modern animations rely on properties the browser handles very efficiently, and only run when the element is visible. What matters is loading the essentials first, then enriching the experience.

Measure before acting

Free tools like PageSpeed Insights or Search Console show which pages to improve and exactly what to fix. Measure before and after each change: it is the only way to know what really worked.