Why Core Web Vitals Still Matter for Your Small Business Website in 2025
It has been over two years since Google made Core Web Vitals a ranking factor, and the question many small business owners ask is whether they still matter. The short answer: yes, and arguably more than ever.
Google’s page experience signals continue to influence search rankings, and the gap between fast and slow websites is growing as more businesses optimize their sites. If your website is slow, you are falling behind competitors who have already addressed their performance.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are three specific metrics that Google uses to measure user experience on your website:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how quickly the main content of your page loads. Google considers a good LCP to be 2.5 seconds or faster.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024 as the responsiveness metric. INP measures how quickly your page responds to user interactions like clicks, taps, and keyboard inputs. A good INP is 200 milliseconds or less.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability, specifically how much content shifts around as the page loads. A good CLS score is 0.1 or less.
Why They Matter More Now
The Competitive Gap Is Widening
As larger businesses and well-resourced websites optimize their performance, the bar for what constitutes “fast enough” keeps rising. A website that loaded acceptably in 2023 may now feel slow compared to optimized competitors, both to users and to Google’s algorithms.
Mobile Performance Is Critical
Over 60 percent of web traffic comes from mobile devices, and mobile connections are typically slower than desktop. Core Web Vitals are measured on mobile by default in Google’s assessments. If your site performs well on a fast desktop connection but struggles on mobile, your Core Web Vitals scores will reflect the mobile experience.
Users Expect Speed
Research consistently shows that users abandon slow websites. A page that takes more than three seconds to load loses nearly half its visitors. For small businesses where every visitor counts, a slow website is a leaky bucket that wastes your marketing investment.
Common Issues for Small Business Websites
Unoptimized Images
This is by far the most common performance problem for small business websites. Large, uncompressed images can add megabytes to your page load time. Solutions include:
- Compress images before uploading (tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh work well)
- Use modern formats like WebP instead of JPEG or PNG
- Implement lazy loading so images below the fold do not load until the user scrolls to them
- Specify image dimensions in your HTML to prevent layout shifts
Too Many Third-Party Scripts
Every chat widget, analytics tool, social media embed, and advertising script adds weight to your page. Audit your third-party scripts and remove anything you are not actively using. For the scripts you keep, look for options to load them asynchronously so they do not block your main content.
Slow Hosting
Budget hosting plans often mean shared servers with limited resources. If your hosting plan costs less than $10 per month, there is a good chance your server response time is holding back your performance. Consider upgrading to a hosting provider that offers solid-state drives, content delivery networks, and server-level caching.
Render-Blocking Resources
CSS and JavaScript files that load in the head of your page can block rendering and slow your LCP. Work with your developer or website platform to defer non-critical resources and inline critical CSS.
How to Improve Your Scores
- Run a PageSpeed Insights test on your homepage and three to five of your most important pages
- Focus on LCP first since it has the biggest impact on both rankings and user experience
- Address the specific recommendations that PageSpeed Insights provides, which are prioritized by impact
- Retest after changes to verify improvements
If you want deeper insight into how your website performance compares to competitors and how it affects your search rankings, tools like Semrush provide comprehensive site audit features that include Core Web Vitals monitoring alongside your SEO performance data.
The Bottom Line
Core Web Vitals are not a passing trend. They are part of Google’s long-term commitment to rewarding websites that provide good user experiences. For small businesses, the good news is that most performance improvements are straightforward and affordable. Spend a few hours optimizing your images and cleaning up unnecessary scripts, and you will likely see meaningful improvements in both your Core Web Vitals scores and your overall website performance.