Slow Page Speed

Why this matters

Google measures Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift on real Chrome users. Miss the thresholds (LCP > 2.5s, INP > 200ms, CLS > 0.1) and Search Console flags the URL group as "needs improvement" inside the Core Web Vitals report. The conversion damage lands first: every 1 second of mobile load time costs about 7% in conversion (Akamai 2017 study, replicated by Deloitte's Milliseconds Make Millions in 2020). The ranking damage lands later, but it lands.

How to fix it (3 steps)

1. 1

   Run PageSpeed Insights on your slowest top-traffic URL

   Open pagespeed.web.dev, paste the URL, look at LCP first. On most pages it's one image above the fold. Fixing the LCP element usually fixes the score on its own.

2. 2

   Compress and lazy-load images, set explicit width/height

   Convert hero images to WebP or AVIF. Lazy-load anything below the fold with loading="lazy". Set width and height attributes on every <img> so the browser reserves space and CLS stays under 0.1.

3. 3

   Defer or load-on-interaction every third-party script

   Analytics, chat widgets, marketing tags. They're the largest INP killer on most pages. Mark them async or defer, or load them only after the user scrolls or clicks. Audit your tag manager once a quarter — most sites carry tags from vendors they stopped using two years ago.