Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash
Site speed is not one number - here's what actually determines how fast a site feels, and why it affects revenue and rankings.
"Make the site faster" is a common ask, but speed isn't one number - it's a handful of separate things a visitor experiences differently: how fast content appears, how fast it becomes usable, and how much it jumps around while loading.
The metrics that actually matter
- Largest Contentful Paint - how long until the main content is visible.
- Interaction to Next Paint - how responsive the page feels once you start clicking.
- Cumulative Layout Shift - how much things jump around as images and fonts load in.
These are Google's own Core Web Vitals, and they directly affect both user experience and search rankings - web.dev's Core Web Vitals guide is the clearest reference if you want the real detail.
Where speed is actually won or lost
Mostly in decisions made before a single line of frontend code is written: how images are served, whether pages are rendered statically or on every request, and how much unnecessary JavaScript ships to the browser. A pretty design on a slow foundation will always feel slow.
It's also why performance is something we build in from the architecture stage rather than optimize after the fact - if this is something you're weighing for a rebuild or a new product, we're happy to talk it through.
