Mobile speed is mostly a solved problem — 146 of 1,246 fail
The version of this page that stood here until recently was a troubleshooting checklist, on the assumption that mobile performance is where local business websites fail. Measured, it is not.
Across 1246 businesses the median Core Web Vitals score is 64, only 146 score below 50, and 41 score a perfect 100.
Modern hosting, modern themes and modern image handling fixed this for most firms without anyone deciding to fix it. Which makes it a strange thing to still sell as the priority.
And it does not predict ranking
Section titled “And it does not predict ranking”We tested it directly. Speed on one axis, share of the sector keyword basket ranked on the other, 1246 businesses:
| Speed score | Businesses | Median search visibility |
|---|---|---|
| 0–39 | 61 | 8 |
| 40–54 | 162 | 13 |
| 55–69 | 605 | 4 |
| 70–84 | 271 | 4 |
| 85–100 | 147 | 0 |
The bands do not order and the correlation is -0.087 — no usable relationship. The full write-up covers why the belief persists, including the confound that fast sites tend to be well-maintained sites.
When speed is still your problem
Section titled “When speed is still your problem”Three cases, and they are real:
You are in the 146 below 50. Then it is worth fixing, and it is usually one cause: uncompressed hero images, a page builder loading everything on every page, or a shared host that is oversold. Check the actual field data rather than a lab score — most local sites have too little traffic to appear in Chrome’s public dataset, which is itself a finding.
Your customers are on poor connections. Rural Gloucestershire is not central Bristol. A lab score from a fast connection can hide a genuinely slow experience.
Conversion rather than ranking. Speed affects whether someone waits, which is a real commercial argument — it is just not a ranking argument, and conflating the two is how the priority got distorted.
What to do instead
Section titled “What to do instead”If your Core Web Vitals are green and enquiries are flat, the speed work is done. The pillars where nearly every local business is failing are visibility and AI search presence, and neither is fixed by a faster site.
Figures recomputed at build time from the published datasets, 1246 businesses across the South West.