Page Speed
Page speed measures how quickly the content on a web page loads and becomes interactive, directly affecting user experience, search rankings, and conversion rates.
Page speed is a catch-all term for how fast a web page loads. It's measured in multiple ways: Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures server response time, First Contentful Paint (FCP) measures when the first content appears, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures when the main content is visible, and Time to Interactive (TTI) measures when the page is fully usable.
Google's PageSpeed Insights tool and Lighthouse audit provide detailed performance scores and actionable recommendations. These tools measure both lab data (simulated conditions) and field data (real user measurements from Chrome UX Report).
In practice
- A retail website reduced their page load time from 5.7 seconds to 1.8 seconds and saw a 23% increase in conversion rate and 15% decrease in bounce rate
- A news site optimized their images from average 2MB to 150KB each and improved their PageSpeed Insights score from 35 to 85
- A B2B company removed 8 third-party tracking scripts that were adding 3 seconds to page load time, with no measurable impact on their analytics accuracy
- A travel booking site implemented lazy loading for below-the-fold content and improved their Core Web Vitals, gaining a measurable ranking boost in Google
Not sure how this applies to you?
A senior engineer walks your site, your search presence and the way enquiries reach you, then writes down the three things worth fixing first. You keep the document either way.