Google made it official in 2021: page experience — including load speed — is a ranking factor. Since then, slow websites don't just frustrate visitors, they rank lower. If your competitors have faster sites, they're getting your traffic.
What Core Web Vitals actually measure
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how quickly the main content loads — should be under 2.5 seconds
- FID / INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how fast your site responds to user input
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): whether elements jump around as the page loads
You can check your scores right now: go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and enter your URL. A score under 50 on mobile is a serious problem.
The most common culprits
- Unoptimised images: a hero image that's 4MB instead of 80kb can add 3-4 seconds alone
- Cheap shared hosting: if your server responds slowly, nothing else matters
- Bloated page builders: Elementor, WPBakery, and Divi add massive CSS/JS overhead
- Too many plugins: every WordPress plugin adds requests and potential conflicts
- No caching: rebuilding every page on every visit instead of serving cached versions
Quick wins you can do today
- Run all images through Squoosh or ShortPixel and re-upload them as WebP
- Move to a proper hosting provider (Cloudways, Kinsta, or WP Engine for WordPress)
- Install a caching plugin (WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache)
- Use Cloudflare's free CDN to serve assets from edge servers closer to your visitors
When a rebuild is the right answer
If your site was built on a bloated page builder and is scoring under 30 on mobile, a fresh build is often faster and cheaper than patching the existing site. A custom WordPress theme built properly will score 90+ by default — because there's no unnecessary code to carry.
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