Performance
Your site's speed directly affects your revenue. Every second of load time costs you customers — and Google knows it.
Why speed matters for your business
Most small business sites score 30-50 on Google PageSpeed. Squarespace loads 20+ scripts on every page. WordPress sites ship entire framework runtimes to render a contact page. Every unnecessary kilobyte is a tax on your visitors' patience and your Google ranking.
Every North Blue Digital site scores 98-100 on PageSpeed — no page builders, no unnecessary scripts, every line of code intentional.
What gets measured
Google evaluates your site on three Core Web Vitals. Here's what they mean in plain language:
- LCP — Largest Contentful Paint
- How fast does the main content appear? If your hero image takes 4 seconds to show up, visitors have already decided your business is slow. Target: under 2.5 seconds.
- CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift
- Does the page jump around while loading? If your visitor tries to tap a button and an ad pushes it down, that's layout shift. We prevent it with explicit image dimensions, inlined critical CSS, and zero third-party layout dependencies. Target: under 0.1.
- INP — Interaction to Next Paint
- How fast does the page respond when someone taps or clicks? Heavy JavaScript frameworks block the main thread. Our sites ship minimal JS — our entire interactive runtime is 14KB. Target: under 200ms.
Performance is equity
This isn't abstract. The2026 Performance Inequality Gap reportlays out the numbers:
- Low-end Android devices are 9x slower than contemporary iPhones in single-core performance — and that gap hasn't improved since 2022.
- The 75th percentile connection delivers only 9 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up, and 100ms round-trip time. 4G remains the backbone. 5G adoption at lower price points lags significantly.
- Mobile JavaScript payloads have doubled since 2015 — from 680KB to 1.3MB at the 75th percentile. The median mobile page (2.6MB) already exceeds the budget for a 3-second load.
- Page sizes have grown 2.5x over a decade while low-end device capability has stayed flat — widening the gap between what sites demand and what most users' hardware can deliver.
What this means in practice: slow sites punish low-income users disproportionately. The person browsing your site on a $150 Samsung Galaxy A24 over 4G is experiencing a completely different website than the person on a MacBook Pro over fiber. If your site takes 12 seconds to load for them, they leave — and you never know you lost them.
Alex Russell, the report's author, calls developer privilege bubbles "malpractice" — testing only on fast hardware and fast connections, then assuming the site works for everyone. He recommends testing on actual low-end devices, not DevTools throttling (which is inaccurate).
This is why North Blue Digital sites ship ~14KB of JavaScript. The median site ships 1.3MB. That's not a minor optimization — it's the difference between a site that works on a $150 phone and one that doesn't. CSS and image-heavy sites perform better byte-for-byte than JavaScript-heavy frameworks. That architecture was chosen deliberately.
| Median website (2026) | NBD site | 2026 budget (3s load) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total page size | 2.6 MB | ~120-250 KB | 1.2-2.0 MB |
| JavaScript | 1.3 MB | ~5 KB compressed | The less, the better |
| CSS | varies | ~10-14 KB compressed | — |
| Fonts | 100-300 KB | 0 KB (system stack) | — |
| On a Galaxy A24 (4G) | 8-15 seconds | < 1 second | 3 seconds target |
| vs. 3s budget | Over budget | 8-13x under budget | — |
The median site already exceeds the budget for a 3-second load. Our sites aren't just under the budget — they're an order of magnitude under it. That's not an optimization. It's a fundamentally different architecture: CSS and images instead of JavaScript frameworks, static HTML from edge cache instead of server rendering, system fonts instead of web font downloads, and server-side tracking instead of client-side tag managers.
Performance isn't a vanity metric. It's access. When you build a site that loads in under 3 seconds on a budget phone, you're not just improving your Google ranking — you're making your business reachable by everyone who visits it, regardless of what they can afford.
Common questions
- How do I check my site's PageSpeed score?
- Go topagespeed.web.dev, enter your URL, and run the test. Check both mobile and desktop — mobile is what Google uses for ranking. If you score below 90, your site is actively costing you customers and search visibility.
- Why is my Squarespace / WordPress site so slow?
- Page builders generate bloated HTML and load dozens of scripts — analytics, fonts, animations, form handlers, cookie consent, chat widgets. Each one adds network requests and blocks rendering. A typical Squarespace page loads 20+ scripts. Our sites load 1-2.
- Does page speed really affect my Google ranking?
- Yes. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, and they index mobile-first. A slow mobile score means lower rankings, fewer impressions, fewer clicks. If your competitor loads faster, they rank higher — all else being equal.
- What about images? My site has a lot of photos.
- Images are usually the biggest performance bottleneck. A single unoptimized hero image can be 2-3MB — your entire site should be under 500KB. We use modern formats (WebP/AVIF), proper sizing via srcset, explicit dimensions to prevent layout shift, and lazy loading below the fold.
- Can you make my existing site faster without rebuilding it?
- Sometimes, but usually not enough to matter. If your site is built on WordPress or Squarespace, the performance ceiling is baked into the platform. We can audit it and show you exactly where the bottlenecks are — but a 30-point improvement often requires starting from clean code.
How your site stays fast
- Intentionally built HTML and CSS — no framework runtime, no page builder output, no unnecessary dependencies
- Cloudflare edge caching — your site is served from the data center closest to each visitor
- Server-side tracking — Zaraz replaces Google Tag Manager, running analytics server-side with zero client JavaScript
- Automatic image optimization — WebP/AVIF conversion at the edge, proper srcset for every viewport
- Continuous monitoring — weekly PageSpeed reports catch regressions before they affect your visitors
Curious about your score?
Get a free PageSpeed audit
Get your site tested on mobile and desktop — see exactly what's slowing it down. Free, no commitment.