Core Web Vitals and site speed
A green lab score on your laptop means very little. What counts is the measurement Google takes from real visitors on real connections, and that number is usually much worse.
Field data, not lab scores
PageSpeed Insights gives you two numbers and most people read the wrong one. The lab score is a simulation on a fixed device. The field data is what actual visitors experienced over the last twenty-eight days, and it's what Google uses. We work from the field data, segmented by device and page template, because a site can pass comfortably on desktop and fail every threshold on the phones most of your traffic arrives on.
Fixing causes, not symptoms
Lazy-loading everything and compressing a few images moves the number slightly and solves nothing. The real culprits are render-blocking third-party scripts, fonts loading without a size-adjust fallback, images with no dimensions causing layout shift, and a tag manager container that has accumulated eleven tools nobody remembers adding. We find which of those is actually costing you, in what order, and remove it.
Common questions
Will faster pages actually improve my rankings?
Directly, a little: speed is a real but modest ranking factor. Indirectly, a lot, because people abandon slow pages and that behaviour feeds back. The clearer win is conversion: the same traffic buying more.
My site is on a platform I can't change. Can you still help?
Usually yes. Even on a closed platform, most of the damage is in the theme, the images and the third-party scripts, and all three are under your control.
Keep reading
- Web design and developmentA website isn't a brochure. It's the salesperson that works while you sleep, and most of the ones we audit are built as though nobody would ever open them on a phone.
- Technical SEO auditMost sites don't rank because of something they're missing. They don't rank because of something they're doing, and nobody has looked closely enough to find it.
- Conversion rate optimisationDoubling your traffic is slow and expensive. Doubling the proportion of it that buys is often a fortnight's work, and nobody does it first.
- Website migration without losing rankingsThe traffic drop after a relaunch isn't bad luck. It's a redirect map nobody made, and by the time it shows up in the reporting the agency has already invoiced.