Web TeamYou’ve probably done it yourself. You tap a link, the page just sits there, and you hit back. Your customers do the same thing to your site.
Speed isn’t a tech detail. It’s whether people stick around long enough to call you.
What a slow site costs
Google looked at data from thousands of mobile sites and found that 53% of mobile visits were dropped when a page took longer than 3 seconds to load. That study is from 2016, but people have only gotten less patient since.
Speed also plays a part in how Google ranks pages. A slow site can mean fewer people find you to begin with.
Core Web Vitals in plain English
Google measures speed with three scores called Core Web Vitals. Here’s what each one means.
LCP: how fast the main stuff shows up
LCP stands for Largest Contentful Paint. In plain terms, it’s how long until the biggest thing on the screen loads. Usually that’s your main photo or headline.
Good is 2.5 seconds or less. Poor is over 4 seconds.
INP: how fast the page reacts
INP stands for Interaction to Next Paint. It measures how long the page takes to respond when someone taps a button or opens a menu. If you tap and nothing happens for a moment, that’s bad INP.
Good is 200 milliseconds or less. That’s a fifth of a second. Poor is over half a second.
CLS: does stuff jump around
CLS stands for Cumulative Layout Shift. It’s when the page moves while you’re reading. You go to tap a button and an ad loads, and you tap the wrong thing. Annoying, right?
Good is a score of 0.1 or less. Poor is over 0.25.
Google looks at these scores from real visitors, not a test lab. To pass, at least 75% of visits need to hit the “good” mark.
How WordPress sites do
Not great, honestly. HTTP Archive data from September 2026 shows that only about 48% of WordPress sites pass all three Core Web Vitals on mobile. So roughly half are failing on the device most customers use.
Why WordPress sites get slow
These are the usual causes we find:
- Huge images. A photo straight off a phone can be 5 MB. It should be a small fraction of that.
- Too many plugins. Each one can add code that loads on every page.
- Heavy page builders and themes. Some load a lot of extra stuff you never use.
- Cheap hosting. A crowded server is slow no matter what you do to the site.
- No caching. Without it, the server builds each page from scratch for every visitor.
- Old PHP. Newer PHP versions are faster, and as of October 2026, 8.1 and older don’t get security fixes either.
- Too many outside scripts. Chat widgets, trackers, and pop-ups all add weight.
How to check your own site
Go to Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool at pagespeed.web.dev. Type in your web address. Look at the mobile results first.
If you see red or orange, there’s room to improve. If it says there isn’t enough real visitor data, it will still show test scores you can use as a rough guide.
Speed checklist
- Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights on mobile
- Shrink and compress images before you upload them
- Use modern image formats like WebP
- Remove plugins you don’t need
- Turn on caching
- Ask your host what PHP version you’re on
- Cut outside scripts you don’t really use
- Test your site on your own phone, on cell data, not Wi-Fi
The short version
A fast site keeps people around. A slow one sends them to your competitor. Most fixes aren’t fancy. They just take someone who knows where to look.
Want to see how your site scores? Book a free 30-minute website audit. We’ll run the numbers with you on a call and explain what they mean.
