Campaigns spend a lot of time worrying about what goes on their website, including the positioning, the photos, the candidate’s bio, and the donate button, but few followup and check how fast it actually loads. A sluggish website means voters can’t find the information they need, supporters miss the signup form, and donors skip the checkout.
Google has been incorporating site speed into its search rankings for years and gives anyone access to this information for free. As AI continues to grow, sites that chatbots and agents can access quickly will also gain an edge.
Here’s what Google tracks and what you can do about it.
Core Web Vitals
Google boils site speed down to three numbers it calls Core Web Vitals:
- How fast your main content loads, called the Largest Contentful Paint, with a target time of under 2.5 seconds.
- How quickly the page reacts when someone taps or clicks, called Interaction to Next Paint, with a target of under 200 milliseconds.
- Whether elements on your page move and by how much, called Cumulative Layout Shift, which should be as little as possible.
Sites are graded on real visits from users, which can make Core Web Vitals vastly different from what you experience in your office.
Check Your Vitals
Visit PageSpeed Insights, paste in your campaign’s homepage URL, and hit Analyze. Within a few seconds you’ll have a full report, starting with mobile, then desktop. You’ll get a Pass, Fail, or Insufficient Data. The goal is to be in the green on all three metrics, not a perfect score.
Insufficient data just means that there hasn’t been enough real user traffic for Google to make the assessment. It’s common for a new site or one that doesn’t get a lot of traffic. You can still see the lab results, where Google simulates a page load and provides a Performance score between 0 and 100.
Why They Matter
Every extra second your site takes to load means fewer signups and donations. Over the course of a campaign that can really add up.
Especially if you’re running paid ads on Facebook and Google, a slow website means wasted money. Your ranking on Google Search is also affected by speed.
How To Fix Problems
Most of your site’s slowdown will be caused by things like large images or too many tracking pixels. PageSpeed Insights gives you a clear roadmap of what to fix right from the results page. Compressing images with a tool like TinyPNG before uploading to your website is an easy fix you can make on your own.
Other fixes need someone with technical skills. You don't need to know how to fix it so much as know enough to ask for it, which is the whole game when it comes to managing campaign technology and picking the right tools in the first place.
Conclusion
A slow website could be costing you support, donations, and votes, but with a simple, free test you’ll know what’s going on and how to fix it.