Speed
Your site reacts quickly when real visitors tap it
performance.field-inp-poor
Why this matters
Responsiveness is how long a page takes to visibly react after somebody taps it — not how fast it loads, but whether it feels stuck once it has. It is the one thing a scan genuinely cannot measure, because there is nobody there to do the tapping, so a synthetic test can only estimate it from how busy the page looks. Where Google has collected the figure from real Chrome visitors, it is a measurement rather than an estimate, and it is usually caused by scripts doing work in response to the tap itself.
Who fixes it
A developer
Roughly how long
half a day
Care needed
Test before and after
How to fix it
Open the page in Chrome, record a performance profile and tap the thing that feels worst. The long task that follows the tap is the cause. The usual culprits are analytics or chat scripts hooked to clicks, and handlers that do their work before letting the browser paint — moving that work after a `requestAnimationFrame` is often the whole fix.
How we score it
Failing this check takes up to 18 points off your speed score. This one is a measurement rather than a fact about your markup, so two scans of an unchanged site can legitimately differ a little.
Does your site pass this one?
This check runs on every scan, along with the other 106. Free, no account, and you see the evidence for each result.
Check my siteOther speed checks
- Every page gets the files it asks forA file that is missing on one template is missing on every page built from it, which is usually hundreds of pages rather than one. It is also the hardest kind to notice from the inside: a browser that has an older copy of the file will carry on showing it long after the file itself has gone, so the site looks correct to whoever built it and broken to everybody arriving fresh.
- Every page responds promptlyWhen one part of a site responds noticeably slower than the rest, it usually points at one specific thing rather than at the hosting in general — a heavy search query, an unindexed database lookup, or a page rebuilding something on every request. That makes it one of the more fixable speed problems, because there is a single cause to find.
- Everything the page asks for loadsYour page requests these and gets nothing back. Depending on what they are, that means a missing image, a stylesheet that never applies, or a script that never runs — and the page may look fine to you if your browser has an older copy cached.
- First visit after a quiet spell is not slowSome hosting puts a site to sleep when nothing has visited for a while, and the next request has to wake it. Once warm the site is fine, which is why this is easy to miss — the person testing it has usually just loaded the page. The people who get the slow version are the ones arriving overnight, and Google when it crawls at an odd hour.
- Google has enough visitor data to report on your siteGoogle publishes real-visitor speed figures for a site only once enough Chrome users have been there to make the numbers meaningful and anonymous. Below that threshold there is nothing to publish, which is the ordinary situation for a small business site and says nothing about how well the site is built. It does mean every speed figure in a report like this one is a simulation rather than a record of what happened to anybody.
- Images reserve their space before loadingThe browser cannot tell how tall these images will be until they have downloaded, so it draws the page without them and then pushes everything down when they arrive. That is the jump people experience as a page moving under their thumb.