Your website is too slow

Core Web Vitals, explained plainly

Google measures your site on three numbers. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is how long the biggest visible thing takes to render: under 2.5 seconds is good, over 4 is failing. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how fast your site responds when someone taps or clicks: under 200 milliseconds is good. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much the page jumps around while loading: under 0.1 is good. Every ranking move, every bounce rate spike, and every lost conversion usually traces back to one of these three numbers being red in Search Console.

The common culprits, in order

Unoptimized images are the biggest one: a 4 MB hero photo blows out LCP on mobile in a single request. Render-blocking JavaScript is next: WordPress themes that load 12 plugins in the head, Google Tag Manager containers firing 20 tags, and analytics scripts that block paint. Third-party bloat, from chat widgets to review embeds, can add two seconds on its own. Missing CDN and cache headers force every visitor to hit your origin server for every asset. We fix these in priority order: images and caching first (fast wins in days), then JavaScript and third-party audit, then server architecture and CDN if needed.

Before and after, on mobile

Desktop numbers lie. Your customers are on mid-range phones on throttled LTE, not a fiber connection with a gaming laptop. We benchmark on a simulated Moto G4 over 4G, the same way Google does for the Core Web Vitals field data that actually affects rankings. Typical engagement: Lighthouse Performance from 38 to 94, LCP from 5.2 seconds to 1.8, CLS from 0.34 to 0.02. That translates into 20-40% more pages ranking on the first page within two months, and a measurable bump in conversion rate the week the changes ship.