Performance as a ranking factor.
WHAT IS MEASURED
- Largest Contentful Paint: how quickly the main content appears
- Interaction to Next Paint: how quickly the page responds to input
- Cumulative Layout Shift: how much the page moves while loading
These reflect what visitors actually experience rather than abstract load times.
WHY LAYOUT SHIFT MATTERS
Content jumping as images and advertisements load is one of the most irritating experiences on the web, and it causes mistaken clicks.
Fix by specifying dimensions for images and reserving space for anything loaded late.
WHERE TO CHECK
Search Console's Core Web Vitals report, which uses real visitor data PageSpeed Insights for individual pages, which gives specific recommendations
WHAT USUALLY FIXES THEM
Caching Optimised images with dimensions specified Removing unnecessary scripts Deferring non-critical JavaScript
A CDN
HOW MUCH IT AFFECTS RANKING
Less than content quality, and more than nothing. A slow site also converts worse, which matters regardless of ranking.
TEST ON MOBILE
That is where most visitors are and where performance problems appear.
