How fast should a business website be?
The speed targets Google uses, why they matter for sales, and five practical fixes for a faster website.
Visitors decide in seconds whether to stay. A slow page loses enquiries before your offer is even seen, and Google uses page experience as one of its ranking signals.
The three numbers to watch
Google's Core Web Vitals measure real user experience. A good result means Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1.
Five fixes that make the biggest difference
- Convert images to WebP and size them for the screen.
- Use a lightweight theme instead of a heavy page builder.
- Turn on page caching and a CDN such as Cloudflare.
- Remove plugins and scripts you do not use.
- Choose hosting that matches your traffic.
Measure before and after with PageSpeed Insights, and test on a real phone, not only on a fast office computer.
