Does website speed actually affect your Google ranking?

• Largest Contentful Paint: how long it takes for the main content of a page to actually appear. Slow images and heavy fonts are the usual cause.
• Interaction to Next Paint: how quickly the page responds once someone clicks or taps something. Bloated JavaScript is usually to blame here.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: whether things jump around as the page loads, an image popping in and pushing the text you were about to read down the screen.

Even ignoring Google entirely, a slow or jumpy site loses visitors before they read a word. Ranking is the reason this gets talked about, but the visitor who leaves because a button wasn't clickable yet is the more immediate cost.

A Core Web Vitals audit checks a site against Google's actual pass thresholds for all three measures, and tunes any page that falls short until it passes. It's built into every Premium build as standard, and it's a £200 add-on on Starter or Growth.

If your site is a few years old, or was built from a template, there's a decent chance it's failing at least one of these without you knowing, and Google Search Console will tell you for free if you want to check before paying for a fix. For a new build, it's less about fixing a problem and more about not creating one in the first place, which is why it's standard on Premium rather than something to bolt on afterwards.