TL;DR: A great website has three jobs: load fast, respond instantly, and stay still. These are called Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS). Fixing them improves your user experience, builds trust, and boosts your Google ranking. The most common fixes are simple: optimize your images and reserve space for them on the page.
You paid for a beautiful website. You invested in the design, the photos, and the copy. But if it’s slow, frustrating, or clunky, you paid for a beautiful billboard in the middle of a desert.
Visitors aren’t sticking around. Your bounce rate is high. You feel like you’re shouting into the void.
The problem often isn’t your product or your message. It’s the experience. Your website isn’t respecting your visitor’s time. And in the digital world, a lack of respect is punished with a click of the “back” button.
The good news is, fixing this is simpler than you think. You just need to focus on what your users (and Google) actually care about.
Meet the Three Guardians of a Great Experience
Google has a simple way to measure how a website feels to a real person. They call them the Core Web Vitals. Think of them not as technical jargon, but as three guardians of your website’s front door. If a visitor can’t get past them, they’ll never see the great things you have inside.
Let’s meet them.
Guardian #1: LCP – The First Impression
- What it is: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) simply measures how long it takes for the most important part of your page to appear. This is usually your main headline, a hero image, or the first big block of text.
- Why it matters: This is your digital first impression. If it takes longer than 2.5 seconds, people start to get impatient. They feel like the site is broken. More than 4 seconds, and a huge chunk of them are already gone.
- How to fix it:
- Compress Your Images. This is the biggest and easiest win. Large, unoptimized images are the #1 cause of slow load times. Use tools like TinyPNG or an image plugin to shrink them without losing quality.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN stores copies of your site on servers all over the world, so it loads fast for everyone, no matter where they are.
- Prioritize the Main Event. Tell the browser which element is most important. A developer can add a
fetchpriority="high"tag to your main image so it loads first.
Guardian #2: FID – The Instant Response
- What it is: First Input Delay (FID) measures the time it takes for your website to respond when a user first interacts with it—like clicking a button, opening a menu, or typing in a form.
- Why it matters: Have you ever clicked a button and nothing happened for a second? It’s frustrating. It makes you lose trust. An instant response makes the website feel alive and reliable. A delay makes it feel broken.
- How to fix it:
- Lighten the JavaScript Load. FID issues are almost always caused by the browser being too busy running code in the background. Your developer can look for ways to break up long tasks or delay loading non-essential code until after the page is interactive.
Guardian #3: CLS – The Stable Ground
- What it is: Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the visual stability of your page. In simple terms: do things jump around while the page is loading?
- Why it matters: This is the most annoying user experience problem. You go to click a link, and just before your finger lands, an image loads above it and pushes the entire page down, causing you to click something else. It’s a guaranteed way to frustrate a user.
- How to fix it:
- Reserve Space for Your Images. This is the fix for 99% of CLS issues. Always set the
widthandheightfor your images and videos in the code. This tells the browser, “Hey, an image is going here, save a spot for it!” so the page doesn’t shift when it finally appears. Do the same for ads, banners, and any other embedded content.
- Reserve Space for Your Images. This is the fix for 99% of CLS issues. Always set the
A Great Website Respects Its Users
Performance isn’t just a technical checklist. It’s a form of hospitality.
A fast, stable, and responsive website communicates care. It tells your visitors, “We value your time. We want you to have a good experience here.” That builds trust, increases engagement, and as a direct result, improves your ranking on Google.
You don’t need to be a technical expert to understand what makes a website great. You just need to see it through your users’ eyes.
Want a free, no-jargon health check for your website? Send us your URL in comments. We’ll run a quick analysis and tell you, in plain English, where the biggest opportunities are to make your visitors feel welcome.