Core Web Vitals in 2026: A Website Speed Checklist for Perth Businesses
A slow website quietly taxes every ad dollar and every Google ranking. This is the practical speed checklist our developer runs on every Perth site we build.
Sam Parker, Website Designer
· 7 min read
Every Perth business wants more traffic, but a slow website quietly wastes the traffic you already have. Google uses page experience signals, including Core Web Vitals, as part of how it ranks pages, and every extra second a page takes to load costs you enquiries. If you are paying for Google or Meta ads, a slow landing page means you are paying for clicks that leave before they see your offer.
This is the checklist I run on every site we build and every site we audit.
The three Core Web Vitals in plain English
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). How long the main content takes to appear. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP). How quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). How much the page jumps around while loading. Aim for under 0.1.
You can check all three for free at PageSpeed Insights. Always look at the mobile score first, because that is how most Perth customers will find you.
The speed checklist
- Compress and resize images. The most common problem by far. Photos straight from a camera or phone can be several megabytes each. Resize to the size they are displayed at and use modern formats like WebP.
- Lazy load anything below the fold. Images further down the page should only load when someone scrolls to them.
- Prioritise the hero. The first big image or heading should load first, not wait behind scripts and fonts.
- Cut unused plugins and scripts. Every chat widget, slider and tracking tag adds weight. Keep what earns its place.
- Reserve space for images and embeds. Setting dimensions stops the page jumping as things load, which fixes most layout shift.
- Use fast hosting and a CDN. A content delivery network serves your site from locations close to your visitors, including here in Australia.
- Limit custom fonts. Two font families with a few weights is plenty.
- Keep video light. Background videos should be short, compressed and muted, with a poster image shown while they load.
When to fix and when to rebuild
Many sites can be improved a lot with the steps above. But if your site is built on a heavy page builder with dozens of plugins, you can end up spending more on patches than a modern rebuild would cost. A site built on a modern framework from the start, like the ones we build, typically loads fast without constant maintenance.
Want to know how your website measures up? Book a free website audit and I will run it through this checklist with you, or see our web design services.
