Website speed: why it matters and how to measure it
Website speed decides whether a client stays or leaves. What Core Web Vitals are, how to measure your website for free and what usually slows it down.
Think of the last time a website took ages to load on your phone. You probably went back and opened another one. Your clients do the same. Website speed is not a technical detail for developers: it is your business's first impression online.
Why website speed matters
- Visitors leave: the longer a page takes, the more people give up before seeing it.
- Google: measures real users' experience on your website and uses it as one of its signals.
- Mobile: most visits come from phones, sometimes on a weak connection. What seems fast on the office computer may not be on patchy 4G.
What Core Web Vitals are
They are three measurements Google uses to sum up a page's loading experience:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long the main element takes to appear, usually the big photo or headline. Good: 2.5 seconds or less.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how long the page takes to react when you tap something. Good: 200 milliseconds or less.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how much things move around while loading, like the button that jumps just as you go to tap it. Good: 0.1 or less.
How to measure website speed for free
- Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and enter your address.
- Look first at the real-user data section, if it appears: that is what counts for Google.
- Check the mobile score, not just desktop.
- Repeat with two or three important pages, not just the home page.
Do not obsess over a perfect 100: a website with a good mobile score and the three measurements in green is more than fine.
What usually hurts a business's website speed
Huge photos
5 MB photos straight from a phone, uploaded as they are. By far the most common cause. A photo properly prepared for the web weighs ten or twenty times less and looks the same.
Too many plugins and scripts
Every plugin, chat widget, ad pixel or social media embed adds code the phone has to download and run.
Heavy templates
"Do everything" templates come with sliders, animations and features your website does not use, but which load anyway.
Slow or distant hosting
A saturated server, or one far from your visitors, adds time to every page.
Badly loaded fonts
Fonts downloaded from external services that delay the text, or that change shape when they finish loading.
What you can do to improve website speed
- Prepare images in modern formats (such as WebP or AVIF) and in several sizes, so phones download the small one.
- Load images that are not visible at first only when they are needed.
- Remove what does not add value: every script has to earn its place.
- Serve the website from a network of servers around the world.
- Generate pages in advance, as in a static website.
That is exactly how Nueva Página websites are built: you can see real examples in work and run them through PageSpeed yourself.
Website speed and Google: what really counts
Google does not reward scoring 100 in a tool; it rewards real people seeing your website quickly and using it without jumps. That is why Core Web Vitals measure three things: how long the main content takes to appear, how long the page takes to respond to a tap and whether elements shift while loading. Google explains this on its Core Web Vitals page.
To check, run your website through PageSpeed Insights and look mainly at the mobile version. If the real-user data is green, you are fine even if the score is not perfect. If it is red, however, start with images: see photos for your website. Nobody notices a fast website; everybody notices a slow one.
Frequently asked questions
Does my website need a 100 on PageSpeed?
No. What matters is that the three Core Web Vitals are green for real users and the mobile score is good.
Does a chat widget slow my website down?
Usually yes, because it loads quite a lot of code. If you need one, it should load only when the user opens it.
Will changing hosting fix a slow website?
Sometimes it helps, but if the problem is photos or plugins, changing hosting will not solve it.
Are Nueva Página websites fast?
Yes. They are static websites with optimised photos and no plugins, built to load quickly on mobile. You can run any of the published work through PageSpeed.