Speed. I Am Speed
Back in the dim and distant past of 2010, Google started using the time it took a page to load (over an average connection speed) as a ranking factor. While it was, back then, a much less important factor than others (especially backlinks), it was the start of Google encouraging the entire internet to be quicker. From 2018, websites which loaded too slowly were actively penalised in mobile search.
In the past it was likely that the cause of a website taking ages to load was images that were just too large. It can be very simple to accidentally make a photo’s file size hundreds of times larger than it needs to be. Generally speaking, this isn’t a problem these days, and not only because modern image formats designed for the web automatically resolve most of these problems.
Today, slow pages are often a result of too many scripts getting in each other’s way. As there are more and more active elements running behind the scenes, this becomes a significant problem.
So What Does Google Look For?
Happily, Google tells us exactly what it is they’re looking for and even provides free tools to tell you how to improve your website. Web browsers have tools built in to analyse page load times and identify any problems, and Google’s Search Console includes a monitoring tool that shows you any problems on your website over time.
The three key factors that Google refer to as the Core Web Vitals (CWV) are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Essentially, this is how long it takes for your website to become usable. Specifically, it’s looking for the biggest elements of content to appear on the screen. The goal here should be to load the site within 2.5 seconds.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
This measures how responsive your website is. When a user clicks or submits a form, how long does it take for that action to result in a response? Long latency leads to frustration for the user, so Google are letting website owners they’ll reward sites that are fast and responsive.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Have you ever tried to click on a link only for a slow part of the page to load, and the link moves beneath your cursor or finger? Did you then click on the wrong link? Or even an ad that you didn’t want to click?
That’s layout shift, and it’s something everyone hates, especially Google’s ranking team (although their Ads interface is lousy with it). Google penalises websites in the search results if their page loads in a hodge-podge manner and elements shift and move as new elements are added.
Increasing Impact on SEO
Search engines want to provide users with a good experience. They want to recommend good websites in response to searches. Because of this, gauging how good a website is at delivering a helpful and enjoyable experience becomes a ranking factor. Over the past 16 years, the speed at which a page loads has become an increasingly important factor, and since 2021, responsiveness and layout stability have been included.
When these factors were originally rolled out, it would be used as a tie-breaker. Two websites with similar quality content and authority would be ranked according to which loaded faster. While this meant page loading times were important, they could often be ignored if your competition wasn’t on the ball.
These days, websites will be penalised in the search results if their Core Web Vitals don’t meet minimum standards. This places greater emphasis on ensuring quick, stable load times and snappy responsiveness.
Google March 2026 Core Update; The Quick and the Dead
We’ve covered this update a couple of times, but one of the changes it brought in was increasing the importance of Core Web Vitals. Good user experience is now right up there with Google’s other acronym for what it rewards in search; E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). This means that your content has to be good, and the user experience of your website has to be good as well.
Poor CWVs now compound the problem of thin or “unhelpful” content on your website, and the March 2026 Core Update saw websites failing these two factors penalised heavily. There’s the additional concern that to be included in Google’s AI responses (AI Overviews and AI Mode) your site needs to serve good information quickly, meaning strong CWV results are vital.
Beyond That Search Click
Just as important as earning that click from a search engine, poor CWV are detriment to your website’s performance in other ways. Users coming to your website from other sources (email campaigns, social media, paid advertising, etc) are likely to be put off by a poor experience. Slow load times and sluggish responses can be kryptonite for your conversion rate, as users abandon the process out of frustration.
There’s also the rise of chatbots and now agentic shopping. An AI agent expects to deliver fast results to its user, so it will want to utilise websites that are fast. If your CWV suffer, so will your traffic (and income) from this next generation of web tools.
Becoming Speed: How to get Quick
Achieving good CWV scores is generally something you need a developer to accomplish. It’s not necessarily easy to improve and it’s not always free. It’s also a scale, so a minor uplift from “bad” to “needs improvement” will have a beneficial impact, whereas going from “good” to “perfect” is often going to be a question of diminishing returns.
Infrastructure
One of the worst impacts on your CWV is when the Time To First Byte (TTFB) is overly long. This means your web server is probably acting like an anchor, dragging your website down. Making sure your server is up to spec and can handle the number of concurrent users you are likely to get is vital.
You can also see an improvement by using a good Content Delivery Network (CDN). This means loading assets (images, scripts, etc) from other servers, reducing the load on your web server. A modern CDN can also help ensure content is delivered in an optimised way and further reduce page load times.
Optimisation
It’s not just making sure that assets are loaded as efficiently as possible, but also that they’re loaded at the right time and in the right order, which can make a difference. Beyond using current format standards (loading images as WebP or AVIF instead of JPG for example), there are also things like only loading large assets when they’re needed (load pictures or video at the top of the page first) and ensuring that the page has the dimensions defined beforehand (to prevent CLS).
The other side of the problem is the code. Ensuring that “render blocking” scripts aren’t holding the whole process up is vital. Third-party scripts can be notorious for this, and especially have to be checked for any outdated elements slowing everything down. In this case, it’s not a question of how many scripts you have; scripts are just text, they aren’t taking up a lot of space or bandwidth. The problem is always execution; the scripts take time to run.
My CWVs Were Great When My New Site Went Live Five Years Ago, I Don’t Have to Worry
Um. Sorry. You do have to worry.
Standards change. Third-party scripts get changed, or not. Browsers get updates. All of these can have a massive impact on how well your website performs according to the current criteria. And with the recent Core Update, you could be asking yourself where your organic traffic has gone.
