Site speed affects SEO because Google can use page experience signals (including Core Web Vitals) as a ranking tie-breaker, and a slow site also loses clicks and leads after people land on your pages.
For most Orlando businesses, speed shows up in two places that matter: (1) visibility, where faster pages tend to perform better when content and authority are similar, and (2) conversions, where a delay of even a couple seconds can turn “ready to call” traffic into back button traffic. If someone finds your dentist, law firm, or pest control listing on their phone while sitting in a parking lot on LTE, a heavy page with big images, videos, and chat widgets can load late, jump around, and feel broken. That hurts bookings more than most businesses expect.
Speed is not just “how fast the page loads.” Google looks at real user experience signals that capture loading, interaction, and layout stability. If you want the plain-English version of what gets measured, our FAQ on Core Web Vitals breaks it down without the developer jargon.
| Metric | What it measures | Good target | What usually fixes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | Main content shows up | 2.5s or less | Smaller images, faster server response, less render-blocking CSS/JS |
| INP | How fast the page responds to taps and clicks | 200ms or less | Reduce heavy JavaScript, delay non-critical scripts, trim third-party tools |
| CLS | Visual stability (page “jumping”) | 0.1 or less | Set image sizes, reserve space for banners, avoid late-loading fonts |
There’s also a practical SEO angle: if your site is slow, Googlebot can crawl fewer pages in a given window and your updates can take longer to show up in search, especially on larger sites with lots of URLs. For smaller local sites, the bigger impact is usually user behavior, people bail, they do not read, and they do not call.
What we do first is measure speed the right way, not just a one-off test. We check Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report for field data (real visitors over time), then use PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to pinpoint what is heavy on the page. If you want a quick gut-check benchmark, our 3-second rule FAQ explains why “feels fast” matters for humans even when scores look decent.
Common fixes that move the needle for Florida service businesses are usually boring, and that’s good: convert hero images to WebP or AVIF, compress and lazy-load below-the-fold images, remove unused plugins and page builder bloat, limit third-party scripts (chat, heatmaps, extra trackers), cache pages properly, and move to hosting that handles traffic spikes. On WordPress, we often see the biggest gains from cleaning up plugins, tightening themes, and pairing caching with solid server-level performance, which is why our WordPress hosting work is closely tied to speed outcomes.
If you want help getting your site fast enough to rank and convert, we can run a practical speed and technical check as part of our SEO services, then fix the few items that actually change load time and user experience, not a long list of tiny tweaks that never touch revenue.
