What Core Web Vitals measure
Core Web Vitals are three numbers Google collects from Chrome users who visit your site. You can see yours in PageSpeed Insights or in Google Search Console.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
How long until the biggest thing on the screen, usually a photo or the headline, has loaded. Google counts 2.5 seconds or less as good.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
How quickly the page reacts when someone taps a button or opens a menu. Good is 200 milliseconds or less. INP replaced the older First Input Delay metric in March 2024.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
How much the page jumps around while it loads, like a button moving just as you go to tap it. Good is a score of 0.1 or less.
What usually slows a small-business site
On the sites I've worked on, the cause is rarely subtle. A hero video in front of everything else is the most common one. Rosehill Design Build's old site never finished loading on a phone. On the new Next.js site, the hero video is compressed with ffmpeg, served with a Cloudflare R2 fallback, and loads after the rest of the page, so nothing waits on it. It scores 90 on mobile and 100 on desktop in PageSpeed Insights (August 2026).
Other regulars are photos uploaded straight from a camera at several megabytes each, chat widgets and tracking scripts that load before your content, and page builders that ship code for features the page doesn't use.
Local search basics
Your Google Business Profile
The map results for a search like "roofer near me" come mostly from Google Business Profiles, not from websites. If you haven't claimed yours, that's usually the most useful hour you can spend on local search. The website supports the profile: the profile links to it, and it helps when the two agree.
Name, area and phone that match everywhere
Your business name, service area and phone number should read the same on the website, the profile and directories like Yelp. If you work from home and don't publish an address, list the area you serve instead.
Pages that say what you do and where
Every page gets a title and description that name the service and the area, for example "Kitchen renovations in Ontario" instead of "Home". I also add structured data, a small block of code that gives Google your business name, service area and contact details directly.
The speed and SEO tune-up
On its own, this is a fixed-price tune-up starting at $750 CAD. It's also included in every WordPress migration and website redesign. The tune-up covers:
- A PageSpeed Insights audit on mobile and desktop.
- Fixing what slows the site down.
- The local SEO basics above.
- Setting up Google Search Console.
- A re-test, with a short before-and-after report.
You also get a short list of anything I couldn't fix without a rebuild. If that list is long, a redesign may cost less than patching.