Website speed: how do I know how my website is performing?

A slow website costs you customers. People on a phone, on a patchy signal, will not wait for a page that takes an age to appear, and they will not come back. Google notices too. Here is how to check your site, what the numbers mean and what to do about them.

Google measures a page's real-world experience with three Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the main content appears. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.

• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Good is 200 milliseconds or less. INP replaced the older First Input Delay measure in March 2024.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while it loads. Good is 0.1 or less.

1. PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev): enter your address and test the mobile version first. The top section shows real-visitor data where Google has enough of it; the lower section is a lab test with specific suggestions.

2. Google Search Console: the Core Web Vitals report groups your pages into good, needs improvement and poor, based on real visits.

3. Your own phone: open the site on mobile data, away from your office wi-fi. If it feels slow to you, it feels slow to your customers.

Test your most important pages, not just the home page: services, contact and anything you advertise.

• Visitors stay. Faster pages hold attention and turn more visits into enquiries.

• Google uses it. Page experience is part of how Google ranks pages. Relevance comes first, but between two equally good answers the better experience helps.

• Everything else works better. Adverts, social posts and emails all send people to your pages; a slow page wastes what you paid to get them there.

The most common problem. A photo straight from a camera can be many times larger than it needs to be. Resize images to the size they display, use modern formats such as WebP, and lazy-load images further down the page.

Every plugin, chat widget, tracking tag and slider adds weight. Remove what you do not use, and question anything that loads on every page.

Page builders make editing easy, but can load far more code than a page needs. Building with a lean structure and one well-organised stylesheet makes a big difference.

Cheap shared hosting is often the bottleneck. Good UK hosting with server-side caching, a modern PHP version and a content delivery network keeps pages quick under load.

Caching serves a ready-made copy of a page instead of building it from scratch for every visitor. On WordPress, it is one of the biggest single improvements available.

Fonts loaded from several outside sources slow the first paint. Host them yourself, load only the weights you use, and preload the ones that matter most.

Speed is built in from the start on every site we make, and kept there with our UK hosting and WordPress care. If your current site is slow, we can audit it and tell you plainly what to fix first. Find out more about our web design.

If this is the problem you are trying to solve, this is where we can help.

• Fast UK hosting →
• WordPress care →
• Web design →

Keep reading: How do I rank better on Google? · Google Analytics 4: a must for every website owner

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gareth@ioniccreativedesign.com