How fast a webpage loads and becomes usable. Slow pages lose visitors, hurt SEO rankings, and directly reduce conversion rates — especially on mobile.
Page speed refers to how quickly a webpage loads and becomes interactive for a visitor. It's measured by several metrics: Time to First Byte (TTFB, how fast the server responds), First Contentful Paint (FCP, when the first content appears), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP, when the main content is visible). Google's PageSpeed Insights tool provides scores and specific improvement recommendations for any URL.
The business impact of slow pages is well-documented. Google research shows that as page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, bounce rate increases 32%. From 1 to 5 seconds, it increases 90%. Each additional second of load time costs a measurable percentage of visitors — visitors who will go to your competitor's faster site instead. On mobile, where connections are slower and patience is thinner, this effect is amplified.
Page speed is also a direct Google ranking factor via Core Web Vitals. Pages that fail Core Web Vitals thresholds (LCP over 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint over 200ms, Cumulative Layout Shift over 0.1) rank below pages that pass them for equivalent content quality. Fast sites earn a ranking advantage over slow ones, all else being equal.
The most common causes of slow business websites: unoptimized images (a single 3MB photo can slow a page by 2+ seconds), cheap shared hosting with slow server response times, bloated WordPress themes with dozens of unused plugins, unminified JavaScript loaded in the page header, and no caching layer. Most slow sites have several of these problems simultaneously.