Keeping your site fast & your details consistent

1Why a slow site hurts you twice

Visitors aren't patient. If your site takes more than a couple of seconds to load, a large share leave before reading a word — back to search results, clicking the next option. That's the bookings problem.

The ranking problem is separate. Google measures how people use your site. Visitors who bounce immediately signal your page didn't deliver — and your ranking quietly slides. A slow site costs you bookings directly and damages your position in results at the same time.

2What Google actually measures (plain English)

Google scores site performance using three measurements called Core Web Vitals. Here's what they mean:

LCP — how fast the main content loads. Largest Contentful Paint. Time for the biggest visible element (usually a photo or heading) to appear. Under 2.5 seconds = good. Above 4 seconds = poor.

INP — how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Interaction to Next Paint. This replaced the older FID metric in March 2024 — any article still citing FID as current is out of date. INP measures every tap and click throughout the visit. Under 200 milliseconds = good. Above 500 milliseconds = poor.

CLS — whether the page jumps around while loading. Cumulative Layout Shift. Measures how much the layout moves as it loads. Under 0.1 = good. Above 0.25 = poor.

Currently only around half of mobile pages pass all three — if yours does, you're already ahead of most competitors. Slow sites with poor scores are also reportedly less likely to appear in Google's AI Overviews, an increasingly important traffic source.

5NAP consistency: what it is and why mismatches cause problems

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone — the three details that need to match everywhere your business appears online: your website, your Google Business Profile, and directories like Yellow Pages, Yelp, and Apple Maps.

Google uses these signals to verify your business is real and correctly located. Consistent NAP is a trust signal. Inconsistencies — different phone formats, slightly different business names, an old address on a forgotten directory — create ambiguity Google has to resolve.

Research by BrightLocal found that businesses with accurate NAP across at least 40 authoritative directories averaged 19% higher Google Maps visibility than those with fragmented listings. Accuracy across major platforms beats volume across hundreds of minor ones. Getting Google, Facebook, Apple Maps, Yelp, and Yellow Pages right is far more valuable than chasing obscure directories.

The most common mismatch is drift, not fraud. A business changes its phone number, updates the website, forgets the directories. A name gets abbreviated differently on different platforms. None of it intentional. All of it counts.

6Your 10-minute self-audit

Run this every three to six months. It catches drift before it compounds.

1. Check your Google Business Profile. Search your business name on Google Maps. Write down the name, address, and phone exactly as they appear — spelling and punctuation included. This is your source of truth.
2. Check your website footer. Most sites show address and phone in the footer. Compare it character by character to your Google listing — same phone format? Same street abbreviation? Fix any difference.
3. Search your business name on Google. Click through the top two or three directory listings and check the NAP on each. Most directories let you claim and correct your listing for free.
4. Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, enter your URL. A mobile score below 50 is affecting you. Note the red items — those are your priorities.
5. Spot-check your images. Open browser developer tools (press F12), go to the Network tab, filter by images. Large uncompressed photos loading = your first fix.