Why does website speed matter, and how do you check it?

Imagine a shop where the door takes ten seconds to open. Most people will walk on by — and that is exactly what happens with slow websites. Speed isn't a technical detail for developers; it decides directly how many visitors ever get as far as your content, and how highly Google ranks you.

Three reasons speed decides

• Visitors don't wait. Even a few seconds of loading means a significant share of visitors hit "back" — before they have seen what you offer. On mobile networks the effect is stronger still.
• Google measures speed and rewards it. Page speed and user experience are official ranking factors. Between two comparable pages, the faster one will generally come out on top.
• Speed sells. Every second of waiting reduces the share of visitors who fill in the form or place the order. A fast site feels professional and inspires confidence.

Core Web Vitals in plain language

Google measures the experience of a page with three main metrics, known together as Core Web Vitals:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — how quickly the main content of the page appears. Target: under 2.5 seconds.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — how quickly the page responds when you click a button or a link. Target: under 200 milliseconds.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — how much the content "jumps around" while loading (the text shifting just as you were about to click). Target: as close to zero as possible.

You don't have to learn the acronyms — what matters is knowing that these are the three things Google measures, and that you can measure them yourself.

How to check your speed yourself (free, in two minutes)

1. Open PageSpeed Insights (Google's free tool).
2. Enter the address of your site and wait for the analysis.
3. Look at the score for mobile (it is the stricter one and the one that matters more) — above 90 is excellent, below 50 is a sign that the site is losing visitors.

Alongside the score, the tool lists concrete opportunities for improvement — a useful list to take into a conversation with your developer.

The usual culprits behind a slow site

• Oversized images — a photo straight off a phone can weigh several megabytes; properly prepared for the web it is a fraction of that, with no visible difference.
• Too many plugins and scripts — every add-on (tracking, chat widgets, banners) slows the load, and a good deal of it isn't even being used.
• Below-average hosting — the cheapest package on an overcrowded server means a slow response before the page even begins to load.
• Outdated, unmaintained templates — they load a mountain of code the site never uses.

What you can do right away

Resize and compress your images (there are free tools online, Squoosh among them), remove the plugins you don't use, and check whether your hosting package still suits your traffic. If the score stays low anyway, the cause is usually deeper — in how the site was built — and that is the point at which it is worth talking to a specialist.

How I deal with it

At PIKSEL ATELJE I build sites with speed as the starting point, not as a fix at the end: optimised images, clean code without unnecessary libraries and a target Lighthouse score of 90+. Animation and visual effects are built so that they don't hold up the first content — good-looking and fast are not mutually exclusive.