In 2021, Google officially confirmed that page experience signals — grouped under the term "Core Web Vitals" — are ranking factors. That means your site's speed and user experience directly affect where you appear in search results.

For many Brisbane businesses, this is invisible bad news. Their site looks fine. It works. But under the hood, it's slow, unstable, and scoring poorly on Google's measurements — and that's quietly dragging down every ranking they're trying to achieve.

What Are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are three specific measurements Google uses to assess the user experience of a web page:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LCP measures how long it takes for the main content of a page to load — typically a large image or block of text. Google wants this to happen within 2.5 seconds. Above 4 seconds is considered "poor".

Most slow Brisbane business sites fail on LCP. The culprit is almost always large, uncompressed images — a hero photo taken on a phone camera and uploaded directly to a site builder without resizing.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

INP measures how quickly a page responds when a user interacts with it — clicking a button, tapping a menu link, submitting a form. A poor INP score means the page feels sluggish and unresponsive.

This is usually caused by excessive JavaScript — too many scripts running on the page at once, competing for processing power on the user's device.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

CLS measures how much the page layout shifts around as it loads. You've experienced this: you go to tap a button, and at the last moment an image loads and pushes everything down, so you accidentally tap something else. That's a high CLS score in action.

Google penalises sites where content jumps around as it loads — because it makes for a poor user experience.

How to Check Your Core Web Vitals

The simplest way: go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and enter your website URL. You'll get an overall score out of 100 and specific scores for each Core Web Vital, along with Google's recommendations for fixing them.

Aim for:

Important: Always test your mobile score, not just desktop. Google uses mobile-first indexing — your mobile score is the one that matters for rankings. Most websites score dramatically lower on mobile.

The Most Common Fixes

Fix Images First

Images are the most common cause of slow LCP scores. Every image on your site should:

Choose Better Hosting

Cheap shared hosting — the kind that costs $5/month — puts your site on a server shared with thousands of other websites. When those sites get traffic, your site slows down. Better hosting (quality managed WordPress hosting, or a static site on a CDN) makes a measurable difference to Core Web Vitals scores.

Reduce Third-Party Scripts

Every plugin, chat widget, tracking script, and social media button adds JavaScript to your page. Each one adds load time. Audit your site for scripts you don't actually need and remove them.

Core Web Vitals and the Bigger Picture

Here's the thing about slow websites: they don't just hurt SEO. They hurt conversion. A site that takes 6 seconds to load on mobile loses approximately 53% of visitors before the page even appears — according to Google's own research. Those visitors don't come back.

This is why when we build websites at Kaza Digital, speed is a first-class consideration from day one — not an afterthought. Every site we deliver scores above 85 on mobile PageSpeed and is optimised for all three Core Web Vitals before launch.

If you want to know how your current site scores and what impact that's having on your Google rankings, request a free audit. We include a full technical performance review in every audit we deliver.