Web Development
What is a good page load speed?
Quick answer
As a rule of thumb, aim for your pages to load in under about 2.5 seconds. Google's Core Web Vitals set the real targets: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5s, Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Hitting those on a real mobile connection is the goal — slower pages lose visitors and tend to rank worse.
Speed is best judged by Google's Core Web Vitals, because they measure what users actually feel: LCP is how fast the main content appears (good is under 2.5 seconds), INP is how quickly the page responds to taps and clicks (under 200ms), and CLS is how much the layout jumps around while loading (under 0.1). Google treats passing all three as 'good'.
Test on a real mobile device and connection, not just your office Wi-Fi, since most visitors are on phones. Free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console show your scores and flag the specific causes — usually oversized images, heavy JavaScript, or slow hosting.
The exact number matters less than the direction: faster is always better. Visitors increasingly abandon pages that feel slow, and speed is a ranking factor, so improving load time helps both conversions and SEO. If you're well over three seconds, that's worth fixing before most other optimisations.
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