Your page loads in four seconds and feels normal to you. Phone visitors may already be opening a competitor’s tab. Google has used Core Web Vitals as part of its page experience signals since 2021, so slow pages can lose both rankings and sales.
Be realistic about the ranking part: Google describes speed as one signal among many, and relevant content still wins. The stronger business case is conversion.
The three metrics
Google’s thresholds for a “good” result, measured on real users:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long until the main content, usually a hero image or heading, appears. Good: under 2.5 seconds.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how quickly the page reacts to a click or tap. Good: under 200 milliseconds. INP replaced FID in March 2024.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): whether the layout jumps while loading. Good: under 0.1.
What the evidence says
- Google’s mobile study found that 53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds to load (2016, so treat it as indicative).
- A study by Deloitte for Google, “Milliseconds make millions”, reported that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile speed raised retail conversion by 8.4%.
- Vodafone improved LCP by 31% and recorded 8% more sales (web.dev case study, 2021).
These come from large sites and your numbers will differ, but the direction is consistent.
Why WordPress and Shopify sites often struggle
A WordPress site with a popular theme and many plugins loads dozens of scripts and style files, and page builders add heavy markup. Shopify is lean out of the box, but every third-party app adds weight. You can check in a minute whether this applies to your site.
How we build fast pages
For new projects we write custom code on Laravel instead of assembling themes and plugins, so there is nothing on the page that the project does not need. In practice that means three things:
- Application code kept in memory between requests (Laravel Octane) instead of booting from zero each time.
- Navigation without full page reloads, which helps LCP and INP.
- Images converted to WebP, sized correctly and lazy-loaded. A single oversized hero image is the most common LCP problem.
We guarantee no score: it depends on content, third-party scripts and hosting.
Three free steps today
- Measure. Enter your URL at PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile result first.
- Fix the hero image. Convert it to WebP and reduce it to the size actually displayed.
- Remove unused plugins. An inactive WordPress plugin can still load code. Delete it and measure again.
If the score is below 50
That usually points to structural causes: too much JavaScript, render-blocking resources, a slow server. It needs an audit with a prioritised task list, not tweaks. Read also how speed fits into mobile optimisation for business websites.
Tell us about your site on the web development page or contact us, and we will say where to start.
Sources
- Core Web Vitals thresholds, web.dev, accessed November 2026
- Google Search Central: Core Web Vitals and search, accessed November 2026
- Milliseconds make millions, web.dev, 2020
- Vodafone case study, web.dev, March 2021
- Google, mobile page speed benchmarks (53% abandonment), 2016 study
