What is Page speed?
Also called: Site speed, Website speed
The short answer
Page speed is how quickly a web page loads and becomes usable, measured by metrics like Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and layout stability.
What people say: “my website is slow”, “how fast my site loads”.
Page speed, explained
Speed shapes everything downstream: people leave slow pages, conversions drop and search engines use real-user speed data as a ranking signal.
The usual culprits are large images, too much JavaScript, slow servers, render-blocking fonts and third-party scripts.
Questions people ask about Page speed
What is Page speed?
Page speed is how quickly a web page loads and becomes usable, measured by metrics like Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and layout stability.
How do I check my website speed?
Run it through PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse, and look at the field data section for how real visitors experience it.
Why is my website slow?
Most often oversized images, heavy JavaScript or plugins, slow hosting, or third-party scripts like chat widgets and trackers.
Related terms
Core Web Vitals are Google's three user-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability.
LighthouseLighthouse is Google's open-source auditing tool that scores a page from 0 to 100 on performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, with specific fixes.
Image optimisationImage optimisation is serving images at the right size, format and quality for each device, so pages load fast without visibly losing quality.
Time to First ByteTime to First Byte is how long the browser waits after requesting a page before the first byte of the response arrives; it reflects server and network speed.
Part of the Web Encyclopedia by Apex Flow Digital. Definitions are general knowledge, kept current, with no invented statistics.