Why speed matters
Speed affects whether visitors stay, whether they buy and how much you pay for ad clicks, as well as how Google assesses page experience. Most of the gains come from a small number of causes, so the work is about finding them rather than chasing a perfect score.
The three Core Web Vitals
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the main content appears. Usually fixed through image handling, server response and render-blocking resources.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds to taps and clicks. Usually fixed by reducing and deferring JavaScript, especially third-party scripts.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the layout jumps. Fixed by reserving space for images, ads and embeds, and loading fonts carefully.
Common fixes
Resizing and converting images to WebP or AVIF, lazy-loading below-the-fold media, removing unused plugins and scripts, deferring chat widgets and trackers until they are needed, caching pages and assets, and upgrading slow hosting where the server is the bottleneck.
Any platform
On WordPress the culprits are usually plugins, page builders and themes; on Laravel it is often database queries and asset handling; on hosted platforms such as Shopify it is apps and theme code. I work on all of them.
Measured properly
I diagnose from real-user field data, re-test after each change and report the before-and-after. Speed is also a core part of technical SEO and conversion rate optimisation.