Website speed for founders: the only three numbers

What is the short answer?

Founders need three numbers, not the acronym. Largest Contentful Paint under two and a half seconds, no layout jumps, snappy taps. Everything else is developer detail. If your site feels slow on a mid-range phone, it is slow — fix that before anything clever.

What usually breaks it?

Images, fonts, and third-party scripts — in that order. Uncompressed hero images, five font weights, chat widgets plus analytics plus pixels. Each adds weight; together they sink phones. Audit with one tool, fix the biggest file first, repeat monthly.

What is the cheapest big win?

Proper images: sized, compressed, lazy. Serve mobile-sized files to phones, compress once, lazy-load below the fold. A single oversized hero often outweighs the entire rest of the page. Images are the budget; spend it deliberately.

When should you care most?

Before any ad spend. Paying to send traffic to a slow page is burning money with extra steps. Speed first, then scale. Fast pages also rank better and get cited more — performance is SEO now.