Page speed and Core Web Vitals: your guest is on a phone with one bar.
Google measures how fast your pages load and ranks on it. More to the point, your guest is deciding where to sleep tonight from a truck-stop parking lot with one bar of signal. A page that takes eight seconds there is a booking that went to the next park.
IN ONE PARAGRAPH
Core Web Vitals are Google's three speed measures: how long until the main content shows, how quickly the page responds to a tap, and whether things jump around while loading. They are a ranking factor and they are measured on real phones. Park sites are slow for the same reasons: giant photos uploaded straight from a camera, a heavy page-builder script bundle, and fonts or widgets that block the page until they arrive. Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool shows your numbers. We measure every site we maintain and keep the homepage under the thresholds.
What Google measures
- Largest Contentful Paint. How long until the biggest thing on the screen, usually the hero photo or headline, is visible. Google wants it under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint. How quickly the page reacts when a guest taps something. Under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift. Whether content jumps as things load, so the guest taps "Book" and hits an ad that slid in. Under 0.1.
Google collects these from real visitors in Chrome and uses them in ranking. A slow site loses twice: it ranks lower, and the visitors it does get leave.
Why park websites are slow
- Photos straight from the camera. A 6 MB image scaled down by the browser is still 6 MB to download. Twenty of them on the homepage is the most common problem we find.
- Builder script bundles. Wix, Duda, and heavy WordPress themes load a large amount of code before showing anything.
- Blocking fonts and widgets. A web font set to hide text until it loads, a chat widget, a weather widget, a Facebook feed, each holding the page.
- Cheap hosting. Shared servers that take a second to answer before anything else can start.
- No caching. Every visit downloads everything again.
What it costs a park
Google has published that the probability of a visitor leaving rises sharply between one and three seconds of load time, and that is on a good connection. On a phone at a rest area with one bar, a heavy page may never finish. The guest opens the next result. The booking platform never sees them. And because the slowness is measured and ranked, the park slides down the results, so fewer guests even try.
How to check your own site
- Open pagespeed.web.dev and enter your homepage. Read the mobile score and the three Core Web Vitals numbers.
- Look at the "Improve image delivery" line. If it lists hundreds of kilobytes, your photos are the problem.
- Stand at the far end of your own park with your phone and load your site. That is what your guest sees.
What we do about it
The sites we build are plain HTML with no builder bundle, photos resized and compressed for the size they display at, fonts set to show text immediately, no blocking widgets, and hosting with caching and compression set correctly. We test on a throttled phone connection before launch and keep the numbers green. When we take over a site, resizing the photos alone usually cuts the load time in half.
Questions about this.
What is a good PageSpeed score for an RV park website?
Green Core Web Vitals on mobile: main content visible under 2.5 seconds, taps answered under 200 milliseconds, and nothing shifting as it loads. The overall mobile score should be 90 or above.
Why is my park website so slow on phones?
Almost always oversized photos, a heavy page-builder script bundle, or widgets and fonts that block the page until they load. Resizing photos is the biggest single fix.
Does page speed affect Google rankings?
Yes. Core Web Vitals, measured from real Chrome visitors, are a ranking factor. Slow sites also lose the visitors they do get before the page shows.
How do I test my RV park website speed?
Use Google's free PageSpeed Insights at pagespeed.web.dev with your homepage address, and read the mobile results. Then load your own site from the far end of your park on a phone.
Want this checked on your park site?
Send us the address. We run the full check and tell you what we found, in plain words. SEO for parks starts at $250 a month.
Part of the RV park SEO guide, section: What a script cannot see. Next: Mobile rendering: Google reads the phone version, and so do your guests.