Marketers usually talk about traffic, channels, offers, and funnels. Website speed often shows up as a single Lighthouse score in a tech report—and then gets ignored until something is obviously broken. That’s a problem, because slow pages quietly erode every metric marketers care about: conversions, lead quality, ROAS, even attribution.

Instead of treating speed as a “nice-to-have”, it makes more sense to treat it like a core marketing metric: tracked consistently, tied to money, and discussed in planning meetings.

That shift is much easier when you can point people to a clear, non-technical resource. For example, if your team needs a deeper walkthrough of real-world metrics and tools, you can share a neutral website speed measurement guide and use it as the common reference when discussing Core Web Vitals and speed reports.

How slow pages distort your analytics

From the perspective of analytics, slow pages don’t just frustrate users—they corrupt your data.

A few ways this shows up in reports:

Bounce rate and engagement: Users abandon slow pages before any meaningful interaction. This creates inflated bounce rates and under-reports events that fire later in the journey.

Channel comparisons: If some landing pages are slower than others, it may look like certain channels or campaigns “don’t work”, when in reality their traffic is being sent to a weaker technical experience.

Conversion funnels: Small delays on checkout or signup steps cause silent drop-offs. Funnels show leaks, but not that those leaks are driven by slow LCP or janky interactions.

Audience quality assumptions: Slow templates often punish users on older devices, bad mobile connections, or in specific geographies. It can look like “this country doesn’t convert” when the real issue is performance.

If you never connect speed data to your analytics, you’re forced to guess. You see that a campaign underperforms, but you don’t know whether to tweak targeting, creative, or the landing page’s technical performance.

When speed becomes a first-class metric, you can segment conversion, revenue, or lead quality by page speed bands and see exactly how much money is tied to “Good” vs “Poor” experiences.

Which website speed metrics actually matter

Page speed is not a single number. It’s a set of moments that describe how quickly users can see, use, and trust the page.

For marketing and product teams, a simple framework is to focus on the three Core Web Vitals that Google surfaces across its tools:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly the main content appears.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How responsive the page feels to user input.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How stable the layout is while loading. (web.dev)

Instead of chasing average values, most performance programs track these metrics at the 75th percentile (p75). That’s the level Google uses in its tooling and recommendations, and it aligns better with what “most users” feel compared to a simple average.

In practical terms, for your key templates (home, landing pages, product pages, checkout):

Aim for LCP ≤ 2.5 s at p75 on mobile.

Aim for INP ≤ 200 ms at p75 on key interactions.

Keep CLS ≤ 0.1 so users aren’t fighting layout jumps.

As a marketer, you don’t need to know how to fix these issues in code. What you do need is the ability to:

Read a speed report and understand whether a page is “Good”, “Needs improvement”, or “Poor”.

Prioritize which templates matter most commercially.

Frame the business impact when requesting performance work.

Collecting speed data without becoming a developer

You don’t have to live in DevTools to bring performance into your reporting. Most of the data you need is already collected by free tools or your existing analytics stack.

Typical sources:

Field (real user) data

Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report groups URLs into Good/Needs improvement/Poor buckets and lets you see how different templates behave.

Some analytics or RUM platforms record LCP/INP/CLS per session so you can correlate them directly with conversion and revenue.

Lab tests

Tools like Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, or WebPageTest simulate page loads from specific devices and networks—useful when you need to reproduce and debug issues your users are seeing.

Official documentation and thresholds

When you need definitions or target values for Core Web Vitals, point teams to the official Core Web Vitals documentation rather than a random blog summary.

For most marketers, the goal isn’t to collect yet another dashboard. It’s to connect speed data to the reports you already use:

Add a “% of sessions with Good CWVs” line to key landing-page reports.

Tag experiments with the LCP/INP ranges they operated in.

Overlay revenue per session by speed band when discussing seasonal performance.

Moving website speed into everyday practice

Treating speed as a one-off “performance project” almost guarantees that the gains will fade. It’s more useful to weave it into existing planning and reporting cycles.

A simple approach:

Make speed visible in KPIs: Include “% of pageviews passing all Core Web Vitals” or “# of templates in Poor status” alongside your usual conversion metrics.

Tie speed to money: Use simple conversion-vs-LCP curves to show what happens to revenue when a key template moves from 3.5 s to 2.5 s at p75.

Prioritize templates, not individual pages: Start with checkout, signup, and top landing templates rather than chasing isolated scores.

Re-check after releases: When a new design, widget, or A/B test ships, re-run your key speed reports and annotate the impact.

Over time, “Is this change good for performance?” becomes as natural a question as “Is this on-brand?” or “Does this align with our targeting?”. That’s when website speed stops being a niche technical topic and starts behaving like what it really is: a core marketing lever that affects every campaign you run.