Why website speed matters and how to improve it
· 2 min read · By the SYNTVEX team
Slow pages lose visitors before they have read a word. Google also measures how a page feels to use, and it is one of several signals it looks at when ranking.
What counts as fast
Google publishes targets called Core Web Vitals. The main content of a page should appear within 2.5 seconds. The page should respond to a tap or click within 200 milliseconds. And content should not jump around while the page loads, which is measured as a layout shift score of 0.1 or less.
The usual reasons a site is slow
- Very large images, often straight from a phone camera at several megabytes each
- Too many plugins and scripts: chat widgets, sliders, trackers and social feeds
- Cheap or overloaded hosting
- No caching
- Heavy themes and page builders that load far more code than the page needs
Fixes that make the biggest difference
- Resize and compress images, and use modern formats such as WebP
- Load images below the first screen only when the visitor scrolls to them
- Remove scripts and plugins you do not really use
- Use reliable hosting, ideally close to your visitors
- Set width and height on images so the layout does not jump
How to check your own site
Run your page through Google PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile result first. It is usually worse than the desktop score, and it reflects what most of your visitors experience. Fix the top two or three items in the report rather than chasing a perfect score.
Speed or design?
A beautiful design that takes eight seconds to open does not get seen. A fast page with no thought put into its design does not convince anyone. A good website needs both, and speed is much easier to build in from the start than to fix later.