Web speed and Core Web Vitals: why Google penalises you

You have a pretty website, with good photos and carefully written text. And even so you don't sell what you should. One of the most common causes, and one of the most ignored, is speed. If your page takes a while to load, the visitor leaves before reading anything. And Google knows it: that's why, for years now, it has measured the real experience of your users and uses it to decide your ranking.

That measurement has a name: Core Web Vitals. It sounds technical, but the concept is simple: Google wants websites that load fast, respond instantly and don't jump around while they load. We'll explain it so you know what to look at and what to demand from whoever runs your website.

What Core Web Vitals are in plain terms

They're three metrics Google considers essential for a good experience. You don't need to learn them by heart, but you do need to understand what each one measures:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long the main element of the page takes to appear, usually the image or the big headline. It should be under 2.5 seconds.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how long the site takes to respond when the user clicks or taps something. Under 200 milliseconds.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how much the content moves while it loads. If you go to tap a button and it shifts on its own, that's bad CLS. The closer to zero, the better.

When these three are in the green, the site feels solid and fast. When they're in the red, the user perceives it as a clunky website even without knowing why, and Google charges you for it in rankings.

Why Google penalises you for being slow

Google lives off people trusting its results. If it sends you to a website that takes five seconds to load on mobile, it looks bad. That's why, between two sites with similar content, it prioritises the one offering a better experience. Speed isn't the only ranking factor, but it is a constant tiebreaker, and in competitive sectors the tiebreakers are everything.

Every extra second to load is a percentage of visitors who leave without giving you a chance. And nearly all of them arrive from mobile.

The detail many people forget: Google measures mostly the mobile version and on normal connections, not on your office fibre. Your website may seem lightning fast on your computer and be failing on a customer's phone in the middle of Seville on a patchy 4G.

The most common causes of a slow website

After auditing many business websites in Granada, Malaga and Madrid, the culprits always repeat. It's hardly ever a mystery:

• Huge unoptimised images: 4 MB photos that could weigh 200 KB with no visible loss of quality.
• Too many plugins or scripts: every add-on and every tracking pixel adds load.
• Cheap, overloaded hosting: if you pay three euros a month, you share a server with hundreds of websites.
• Sliders and autoplay videos on the homepage: pretty, but they kill the LCP.
• Fonts and libraries that load even though they're barely used.

How to measure it yourself in five minutes

You don't need anyone to make the first diagnosis. Go to Google's PageSpeed Insights, paste in your website address and hit analyse. It gives you a score for mobile and another for desktop, and marks each metric in red, amber or green. Pay attention above all to the mobile tab and to whether there's real-user data: that's what counts for Google.

If you see numbers in the red, don't panic. The tool also lists the improvement opportunities ranked by impact. Often, compressing the images and switching hosting already moves half your site into the green.

What to fix first (and what to leave to a professional)

There are things you can tackle yourself and things where it's worth getting help. Start with what gives the most result for the least effort: optimise and compress all the images, remove plugins you don't use and get decent hosting. With that alone, many websites go from failing to passing.

What's best left to someone who knows: CLS and INP usually come from how the website is built underneath, from badly loaded scripts or a heavy theme. That's where you have to get into the code or, sometimes, rethink the whole website. If your site is born slow from the factory, patching it isn't enough.

Speed isn't a technical whim: it's money. A fast website converts more, ranks better and conveys seriousness. If yours is slow and you don't know where to start, we can audit it and get it into the green.