The blog ·
Slow websites: how speed matters to Google
We published this post when Google was starting to make page speed a ranking factor, and we’ve updated it several times since then. Here’s where things stand today, and what you can do.
From 2018 to the present
- 2018: With the so-called ‘Speed Update’, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile searches.
- 2019: The Chrome team presented a proposal: to alert users, whilst a page is loading, to sites that are typically slow. Google described this as an exploratory initiative, with no set timeline.
- 2020–2022: Google announced that it would take ‘page experience’ into account, based on metrics known as Core Web Vitals; this was applied to mobile searches from June 2021, and then to desktop searches in 2022.
- 2024: In March, the INP replaces the FID as the metric for measuring a page’s responsiveness.
Google’s three metrics today
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): less than 2.5 seconds;
- INP (response to a visitor’s action: a click or keystroke): less than 200 milliseconds, across the entire visit, rather than just the first action;
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift, when a block shifts position whilst loading): less than 0.1.
These thresholds are assessed based on your users’ actual visits, as recorded by Chrome, rather than on a single test. They are explained on Google’s web.dev website.
How important is this for SEO?
Let’s be honest: speed alone does not guarantee top rankings. Google ranks pages primarily based on the relevance of their content; where relevance is comparable, a fast site takes precedence. The real issue lies elsewhere: a visitor who has to wait will leave, and a slow site casts doubt on the company’s professionalism. It also uses more resources, both on your servers and on your customers’ phones.
Measuring your site
- PageSpeed Insights analyses a page for free, using data from real visitors where available to Google;
- Search Console groups together slow pages across the entire site in its Core Web Vitals report.
Speed up your website
- Hosting: a server that responds quickly, is well configured, and has a cache. This is the foundation for everything else; it’s what our hosting service specialises in.
- Images: the right size for every screen, in a modern format such as WebP, and loaded only when they come into view. On the websites we build with ArteZya, every image is automatically generated in several sizes.
- Third-party services: every tracking tool, every share button, every external font adds a request and a delay. Keep only those that are truly necessary.
- Code: a theme loaded with unnecessary features weighs down every page; a site built for its intended purpose is lighter.
If your website is slow, we can analyse it and tell you what’s causing the slowness: this is one of the key points of our SEO audit, and ongoing maintenance ensures these issues are corrected over time.