LCP — loading
How long until the biggest thing on screen appears. Usually a hero image or headline. Under 2.5 seconds is good. Over 4 is where people leave. This is the one that moves most when someone finally compresses the images.
Test your website speed
There's no form here on purpose. The standard version of this is a “free website audit” you receive only after handing over an email address — and then a phone call you didn't ask for. The pattern runs all the way up the market: enterprise hosting vendors put their own diagnostics behind a marketing-automation form too. Your own numbers shouldn't cost you your inbox.
For what it's worth, when I checked on 20 August 2026, none of the six web and SEO firms serving Idaho Falls offered a self-serve speed test at all — gated or otherwise. That's not a criticism of them; it's just an easy thing to offer, and it seemed worth being the one who does.
Reading the result
What those numbers mean
The score is the headline, and it's the least useful part. These three are what Google actually measures visitors experiencing.
CLS — stability
How much the page jumps around while it loads. Under 0.1 is good. If you've ever tried to tap a button and hit an ad instead, that's CLS. Almost always caused by images and embeds without dimensions set.
INP — responsiveness
How long the page takes to react when you tap something. Under 200ms is good. This is a JavaScript problem nine times out of ten, and on WordPress it is usually a plugin nobody remembers installing.
Longer version, no jargon: how to read a PageSpeed report — every number explained with a real measured example — plus Core Web Vitals in plain English and what actually makes a website slow.
The work
What actually gets fixed
Images, almost always first. On most slow sites the images are two to ten times larger than they need to be, served at desktop dimensions to phones, in a format from 1996. Fixing that alone routinely halves load time and changes nothing about how the site looks.
Then whatever is blocking the first paint. Render-blocking stylesheets, fonts loaded from a third party, scripts in the head that could be deferred. The browser can't draw anything until it has dealt with them, so every one is dead time the visitor spends looking at nothing.
Then the plugins nobody audits. A slider plugin used on one page loading its JavaScript on all forty. An analytics tag added twice. A chat widget pulling 300KB before anyone has scrolled. This is where WordPress sites quietly rot, and it's the least glamorous, most effective work available.
Then hosting and caching, if they're the problem. Sometimes the site is fine and the server is slow. That shows up as a bad server response time, and no amount of front-end work will fix it — you'll get told that rather than sold a rebuild.
Production load-time reductions of 50% or more have come out of exactly this work. That's a career-level figure across many sites, not a promise about yours — anyone quoting you a specific percentage before looking at your site is guessing. — Alec Willits
The honest test
Run it on this page
A developer selling speed work should be willing to be measured. Put
willitsforge.com into the box above.
For reference, this site ships about 147KB on the critical path, serves every image as WebP with dimensions set so nothing shifts, loads one stylesheet and one deferred script, and makes no third-party requests except analytics. It's hand-coded static, which is the easy mode of web performance — but the same principles are what get applied to a WordPress site that can't be rebuilt from scratch.
Straight answers
Before you ask
Do I need a rebuild to make my site faster?
Usually not. Most speed problems are images, scripts and caching on a site whose structure is fine. A rebuild is the most profitable recommendation available, which is exactly why it deserves skepticism. If yours genuinely needs one, you'll get told why.
Is the score the thing that matters?
No. The score is a weighted summary of lab tests on a simulated phone. Google ranks on field data — real visitors over 28 days. A site can score 70 and pass Core Web Vitals, or score 95 and fail them. The test above shows both when the field data exists.
Why does my site have no field data?
It needs enough real Chrome visitors before Google will report it. Newer or quieter sites show lab numbers only. That's normal and not a fault.
Does a faster site actually rank better?
A little, and less than most people selling speed work imply. Core Web Vitals is a real but small ranking factor. The bigger argument is that people leave slow sites, so speed shows up in conversions long before it shows up in rankings.
Got a result you don't like?
Send me the URL and what the test said. You will get a straight read on what's causing it and roughly what it takes to fix — within one business day, including “that is not worth paying anyone to fix” when it's not.