You do not need to be technical to understand why a slow website costs money. A guest on a phone, standing outside a cafe on a patchy connection, waits a few seconds and then goes back to search results. They never tell you. They just disappear.
Google tracks this experience with a set of measurements called Core Web Vitals. They are worth understanding because they describe, in numbers, what your visitors already feel.
The three numbers, in plain English
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is how long it takes for the main thing on the page, usually the big photo or headline, to show up. Google considers 2.5 seconds or less to be good.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. It replaced an older measurement in 2024. A good score is 200 milliseconds or less, which is fast enough to feel instant.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is how much the page jumps around while it loads, like the button that moves just as you tap it. A good score is 0.1 or less.
These are judged on real visitors' experiences, not just on a test run from your office, and Google looks at what most of your visitors see, not just the best case.
Why so many Bali websites feel slow
Most of the causes are surprisingly ordinary:
- Huge photos. A 6 MB image straight from a camera or a photographer's folder, shown at a quarter of its size.
- Auto-playing hero videos that start loading before anything else.
- Too many plugins and widgets: chat tools, trackers, sliders, pop-ups, each adding its own weight.
- Cheap, distant hosting, so every visit starts with a long wait.
- Fonts and scripts loaded in a way that blocks the page from showing.
Add to that the reality that many visitors are on phones, in places with uneven signal, and the gap between what you see on a fast office connection and what a guest sees becomes obvious.
The fixes that matter most
You do not have to fix everything. These changes usually give the biggest improvements:
- Resize and compress images, and serve modern formats. This alone can transform a site.
- Lazy-load anything below the first screen, so the page does not wait for photos nobody has scrolled to yet.
- Reserve space for images and embedded content so the page does not jump as it loads.
- Cut third-party scripts you do not truly need. Every widget has a cost.
- Choose hosting close to your audience, with a content delivery network for static files.
- Think twice about autoplay video. If you use it, load a small poster image first.
How to check where you stand
Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool shows both a lab test and, when your site has enough visitors, real-world data. The Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console shows how your pages perform for real people over time. Test on a phone and on a normal mobile connection, not just on your own fast Wi-Fi.
Speed is part of the experience, not the whole of it
A fast website with confusing content will not convert either. Speed removes friction, and the rest of the site still has to do its job. But when two businesses are otherwise equal, the faster site has an advantage with both guests and search engines.
Performance is built into how we approach web design and development from the very first sketch, not patched on at the end. If your site feels slow and you are not sure why, send us the address and we will tell you what we see.