Page speed
Page speed is how quickly a web page loads and becomes usable, usually measured on a phone with Google's Core Web Vitals.
Page speed is how quickly a page loads and becomes usable. That means how soon the main content appears, how fast the page reacts when someone taps, and whether it stays still while it loads. It's usually measured on a phone, because that's where pages are slowest and where most people browse.
Slow pages lose people. They also give a worse impression of the brand behind them, whatever the page says.
How it's measured
Most tools use Google's Core Web Vitals:
- Largest Contentful Paint, how long the main content takes to show
- Interaction to Next Paint, how quickly the page responds to a tap or click
- Cumulative Layout Shift, how much the layout jumps around as it loads
Each has published thresholds for good, needs improvement and poor. Google uses them as part of its page experience signals, and its Core Web Vitals guide says good scores help, while great content still matters more.
What usually slows a page down
Images are the most common cause: photos uploaded at full size and shown in a small box. Then come scripts, especially chat widgets, trackers and ad tags, and fonts and styles that block the page while they load.
For example, Fernhill Coffee's home page takes 6 seconds to show its main photo on a phone. The photo is a 4 MB file, and three tracking scripts load before it. Resizing the image and loading the scripts later brings it under 2 seconds.
Page speed and AI search
A person sent from an AI answer to a slow page often leaves before it loads. That wastes the hardest part, being named and linked in the first place.
Bots matter too. A page that takes too long to respond, or that only shows its text after scripts run, may not be read in full. AI platforms don't publish how long their bots wait, so a fast page that sends its main text in the HTML is the safe choice.
In AnswerOrbit
The Pages tab in Website shows each page's health on a phone, banded Good, Needs work or Poor by Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds. Fast on phones is one of the eight page checks.