The two-second rule

Google started rolling out its "page experience" update this month. It has technical names for the three things it now measures, and you will see them in reports: LCP, FID, CLS. Here is what they mean in the language of someone waiting for a page on a phone.

• Does the thing I came for show up quickly? The main image or headline, visible, within about two seconds.
• Does the page hold still? Nothing jumping down the moment a banner, an ad or a font loads, so the button you were about to tap moves and you tap something else.
• Does it respond when I touch it? Tap a menu, it opens. Not after the page finishes thinking.

Google is now using these as part of ranking. It says the effect is modest. We think that undersells it, because the same three things decide whether a visitor stays long enough to become a customer.

The two-second rule

Our rule for years, on every site: the thing the visitor came for is on the screen in two seconds on a normal phone connection. Not the loading spinner, not the logo — the thing. If a page cannot do that, the design is too heavy and it gets lighter until it can.

Two seconds is not a technical target. It is roughly how long a person waits before they start to doubt you.

Why most sites fail this

Not because their developers are bad. Because the sites carry weight nobody chose: a theme that loads six things for one, images straight from the camera, a chat widget, three analytics scripts, a cookie banner that shoves the whole page down when it appears. Each was added by someone with a reason. Together they cost the two seconds.

Why the jumping matters most

Of the three, the jumping is the one people hate and cannot name. You go to tap "Book" and a late-loading image pushes it down, and you tap "Cancel". Or you start reading and the text leaps. The fix is old-fashioned discipline: every image, banner and embed gets its space reserved before it loads, so nothing on the page moves after it arrives.

Check yours

Search Console now has a page-experience report that tells you, per page group, how real visitors experienced your site. It is field data — actual people, actual phones — which is why it is worth more than any speed-test score. Green is fine. Anything else is a list of things to remove.

We build to pass this by default, and we would rather remove three plugins than add a caching one. If you want a second opinion on where your pages stand, send the address; the report takes us ten minutes to read.