Is a slow website costing you inquiries? Core Web Vitals in plain English.
Google measures how fast your pages feel to real visitors with three numbers called Core Web Vitals, and plenty of websites fail them on phones. Here's what each number means, how speed shows up in inquiries and what makes a B2B site pass.
A slow website loses inquiries before anyone reads a word. A buyer taps your link in a search result, watches a blank screen and goes back to the results.
Google measures three things your visitors feel.
Google's web.dev guidance sets a "good" target for each one:
- Loading. How long before the main thing on the page appears, usually the big photo or the headline. Google calls it Largest Contentful Paint. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Responding. How long the page takes to react when someone taps a button or opens a menu. This is Interaction to Next Paint. Good is 200 milliseconds or less.
- Keeping still. How much the page jumps about as it loads, which is what makes people tap the wrong link. This is Cumulative Layout Shift. Good is a score of 0.1 or less.
A page meets a target when at least three in four visits do, measured separately on phones and desktops. The responsiveness measure is newer than many websites. It replaced an older measure in March 2024, so a site tuned before then was tuned for a different test.
Nearly half of websites fail on phones.
The HTTP Archive publishes Core Web Vitals results by technology, built from real Chrome visits. Its August 2026 figures show how sites made with different tools compare:
| Built with | Pass on phones | Pass on desktop |
|---|---|---|
| All websites | 53.0% | 60.2% |
| WordPress | 48.7% | 53.3% |
| Elementor, a WordPress page builder | 36.8% | 43.2% |
| Next.js | 35.1% | 55.5% |
| Wix | 81.2% | 86.8% |
| Squarespace | 72.1% | 66.4% |
Two things stand out. Page builders drag WordPress down. And Next.js, the framework we build with, does worse than WordPress on phones. Many Next.js sites are web apps that give a phone a lot of work, and their biggest gap against WordPress is in how fast they respond to a tap. The score comes down to how each site is built. Hosted builders like Wix and Squarespace score well and suit a simple site, though they limit what a B2B firm can build on top.
Your own numbers come from real visitors too.
Google's figures come from Chrome users visiting real sites. PageSpeed Insights shows them for your own site, along with a lab test that simulates a mid-range phone. Search Console has a Core Web Vitals report that sorts your pages into good, needs improvement and poor. If your site has too few visitors for the real-visitor figures, you'll see the lab test alone, which is still a useful guide.
A PageSpeed Insights report has two halves. The top half is the real-visitor result, with a clear passed or failed and a figure for each of the three measures. The bottom half is the lab test, with a score out of 100 and a list of suggestions. Start with the mobile tab. It's the harder test, and it's the version of your site Google reads. Then run your most visited project page and your contact page as well as the home page, because they often score differently.
Speed shows up in inquiries.
A study Google commissioned from Deloitte tracked the mobile sites of 37 brands in Europe and the US at the end of 2019. On lead generation sites, a 0.1 second speed improvement went with a 21.6% rise in visitors reaching the form submission page. The study measured how speed and behavior moved together, so treat it as a strong hint.
Google uses these numbers in search too. It says Core Web Vitals align with what its ranking systems reward and recommends getting them to good. It's also clear that relevance comes first, so a slow page with the best answer can still outrank a fast one. Speed won't win work by itself, a point we make in fast websites don't grow businesses. A slow site does lose buyers who were already interested.
What slows a B2B website down.
- Huge photos and background video. A drone shot of your latest project can weigh more than the rest of the page put together.
- Page builder code. Extra layout code loaded on every page.
- A slow server. Time to first byte is how long the server takes to start sending the page, and Google's guidance says good is 0.8 seconds or less. In the HTTP Archive's August 2026 data, only 23.5% of WordPress sites managed that on phones, against 45.8% of all websites. Cheap hosting can be part of the reason, which we cover in is cheap shared hosting holding your website back.
- Other companies' scripts. Chat widgets, tracking tags, cookie banners and embedded maps each load code from somewhere else.
- Fonts that load late. Text appears in one font and then jumps when the real one arrives.
What a fast rebuild does differently.
We build pages ahead of time so the server has little to do when a visitor arrives, and serve them from locations close to your buyers. Images are resized for each screen automatically. The code sent to a phone is kept small. Fonts load early with matched stand-ins, so text doesn't jump. Other companies' scripts load after your content. We treat Google's three thresholds as a launch requirement and keep measuring real visits after launch.
Check your own numbers.
Our free Website Health Check is coming soon. It will run Google's speed test on your site for phones and desktops and tell you in plain English what's slowing it down. Join the list and we'll email you when it opens. Until then, PageSpeed Insights gives you the raw numbers.
If the cause is the theme, the page builder or the hosting, it's hard to fix one patch at a time. See how we rebuild legacy websites or book a call.