Website Speed and SEO: Why Slow Sites Lose Rankings in India
Google uses page speed as a ranking signal. More importantly, slow sites lose users: 53% of mobile users abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
The India Context
While 4G and 5G coverage is expanding, rural and Tier 2 city users often experience slower connections. Building for speed is building for your actual audience.
Google's Core Web Vitals (Speed Edition)
| Metric | What it measures | Target |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | Largest Contentful Paint — how fast the main content loads | < 2.5s |
| FID | First Input Delay — how fast the page responds to clicks | < 100ms |
| CLS | Cumulative Layout Shift — does content jump around? | < 0.1 |
Quick Wins
- Compress all images to WebP, under 100KB each
- Remove unused JavaScript
- Enable browser caching
- Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Minimise redirects
How Draftly Handles Speed
Draftly exports static sites hosted on a global CDN. Pages are pre-rendered — there's no server processing on each load. This gives most Draftly sites LCP under 1.5s by default.
Testing Your Speed
Run Google PageSpeed Insights (free). Target 90+ on mobile. Fix the issues it flags in priority order.
