How fast should your website really be?

Most business owners ask how a website should look. The question that actually moves the needle is: how fast does it feel?

Google measures speed with three numbers, called Core Web Vitals. In plain language:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long until the main content appears. Under 2.5 seconds is good. Your customers expect under 2.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Under 200 milliseconds is good.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): does the page jump around while loading? A score near zero means nothing moves.

Why speed matters more than design

Two reasons. First, people leave. Studies consistently show that every extra second of loading costs conversions, and on a mobile connection in Morocco, every kilobyte counts. A visitor on 4G who waits three seconds for a heavy homepage will simply visit the next business in the search results.

Second, Google uses speed as a ranking factor. All else being equal, the faster page outranks the slower one. That means speed is not a technical detail: it is part of your SEO, and it compounds with everything else.

What actually slows websites down

From experience building sites for Moroccan businesses, the usual suspects are:

1. Heavy images. A photo straight from a modern phone can weigh 4 megabytes. The same photo, properly resized and compressed, weighs 80 kilobytes and looks identical on a screen.
2. Too much JavaScript. Sliders, chat widgets, three analytics tools. Each one adds load time. Most of them add nothing for your customers.
3. Cheap hosting. A shared server that takes a second to even start responding will never produce a fast site.
4. A bloated theme. Many template themes load dozens of fonts, icons and scripts you will never use.

What a good score looks like

The sites I build target the same standard as this one: a Lighthouse performance score above 95, the biggest content element on screen in under 2 seconds, and zero layout shift. You can check any site yourself by opening Google PageSpeed Insights and entering the URL.

If your current site scores below 50, you are losing customers every single day, and fixing that is usually far cheaper than buying more ads. That is exactly the kind of project I take on: a rebuild that makes the site fast, keeps the brand, and improves the rankings as a side effect.

Want to know how your site scores? Book a free call and send me the URL. I will run the tests and tell you honestly what is worth fixing.