Glossary Terms

site speed

Site speed is how quickly a page's content loads and becomes usable, measured through signals like Largest Contentful Paint, Time to First Byte, and Total Blocking Time. Google has treated speed as a ranking factor since 2010, and it grew more important when Core Web Vitals joined the page-experience signals in 2021. It's tied directly to results: Google and Deloitte found that a one-second improvement in mobile load time lifted conversion rates by an average of 27 percent. On WordPress the biggest wins usually come from server-level caching on good hosting, serving images as WebP at the right size, deferring render-blocking JavaScript, using a CDN, and cutting the plugin count, especially the heavy ones.