Listen carefully. Look at your competitors' websites. Really look at them.
Open PageSpeed Insights. Type in their URL. Look at the numbers. LCP at 4.8 seconds. INP at 380 milliseconds. CLS at 0.35. "Poor" scores on a red background, everywhere, on mobile and desktop alike.
Now look at theirs. Their homepage takes 5 seconds to load on an iPhone over 4G. Their "Add to Cart" button doesn't respond for half a second after clicking. Their hero image shifts all the text below it during loading. The user rage-quits. The Google bot takes note. The AI agent moves on to the competitor.
In 2026, speed is not a "nice to have." It's a ranking factor. It's a prerequisite for Discover. It's the entry condition for agentic commerce. And it's the first filter AI agents apply before deciding whether your site deserves to be cited, recommended, or used for an automated transaction.
Google has confirmed it: Core Web Vitals are part of the Page Experience signals that directly influence your position in search results. They're not the most powerful factors — content and relevance still come first — but when two pages are equal in substance, performance is the tiebreaker. And in competitive niches, the difference between position 3 and position 8 is half your traffic.
At Glorics, we don't build "fast" websites. We build websites where speed is a structural property, not a patch applied after the fact.
Source: Google Search Central: "Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results" (December 2025) — Google recommends LCP < 2.5s, INP < 200ms, CLS < 0.1 scores for good ranking and user experience.
1. The Three Metrics AI Agents Use as a Filter
Core Web Vitals are not an abstract concept. They are three numbers, measured on real users (CrUX data), that decide your fate.
LCP — Largest Contentful Paint: the time it takes for the largest visible element on your page to render. Your hero image, your main headline, your dominant text block. Google requires under 2.5 seconds. Beyond that, you're in the orange zone. Beyond 4 seconds, you're in the red. And a user who waits 5 seconds has a 38% chance of leaving before reading a single word.
INP — Interaction to Next Paint: responsiveness. When a user clicks a button, how long before something happens on screen? Google requires under 200 milliseconds. INP replaced FID (First Input Delay) in 2024 because FID only measured the first interaction — INP measures every interaction throughout the entire session. It's more demanding, and more honest.
CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift: visual stability. Does your page jump, shift, or rearrange during loading? The button you were about to click disappears because an ad loaded above it. Google requires a score below 0.1. It's the number one driver of user frustration.
These three metrics aren't just Google criteria. AI agents use them as a filter too. A buyer agent that needs to execute a transaction on your site requires the "Buy" button to respond in under 200ms. A recommendation agent crawling your page needs the main content available in under 2.5 seconds to extract it. If your site is slow, unstable, or unresponsive, the agent doesn't waste time — it moves on to the competitor who solved these problems.
2. The Entry Ticket for Google Discover
Google Discover is the personalized news feed Google pushes to Android smartphones and the Google app. It's not search — it's recommendation. Google chooses to show your content to users who never searched for it.
Discover traffic can be massive. Thousands of visits in a few hours, without a single user typing a keyword. But Discover eligibility has a non-negotiable technical prerequisite: passing Core Web Vitals.
If your site has "Poor" scores in LCP, INP, or CLS, you're disqualified. Not penalized — disqualified. Your content simply won't appear in the Discover feed, regardless of its quality. It's binary.
This is a lever most agencies ignore because they're focused on keywords and classic ranking. But Discover traffic is free, qualified, and massive — provided your infrastructure allows it.
3. The Direct Link Between Speed and Conversion
The numbers are not subtle.
An extra 100 milliseconds of loading delay reduces conversion rates by 7%. A page that loads in 2 seconds has a bounce rate of 9%. The same page at 5 seconds? 38%. You've lost four out of ten visitors before they even saw your offer.
If your site gets 1,000 visits/day and converts at 2%, you make 20 sales. If you drop LCP from 5s to 2s, your bounce rate falls from 38% to 9%. You recover roughly 290 visitors who were leaving before. Even with the same conversion rate, that's potentially 5 to 6 extra sales per day. 150 per month. Without spending a single extra dollar on advertising.
In the context of agentic commerce, speed becomes even more critical. A buyer agent doesn't "wait patiently." It has a timeout. If your checkout API takes more than 200ms to respond, it cancels the transaction and moves to the competitor. The agent won't come back tomorrow. It won't give you a second chance. Its protocol is binary: fast response = transaction executed, slow response = abandoned.
4. Why WordPress and Shopify Are Losing the Speed War
Let's be clear about the diagnosis.
WordPress powers over 40% of the web. Shopify runs millions of stores. They are powerful platforms with rich ecosystems. But when it comes to Core Web Vitals, they start with a structural handicap.
The WordPress problem: every plugin adds JavaScript. Yoast loads its script. WooCommerce loads its own. The theme slider loads its own. The chat widget loads its own. The Facebook pixel loads its own. By the end, your page loads 2 to 4 MB of JavaScript, 80% of which is useless on the current page. INP explodes. LCP is delayed by JavaScript parsing. The browser is busy executing code instead of displaying content.
The Shopify problem: the Liquid theme is pre-compiled, but third-party apps each inject their own JavaScript into the <head>. Every reviews app, pop-up, recommendation engine, and A/B testing tool adds its layer. Same result: JavaScript bloat, degraded LCP, catastrophic INP on mobile.
The problem isn't WordPress or Shopify per se. The problem is client-side rendering architecture: the browser receives an empty HTML skeleton and must execute megabytes of JavaScript to build the page. It's the opposite of what Google and AI agents want: pre-rendered HTML, immediately readable, with zero unnecessary JavaScript.
5. The Glorics Architecture: Headless SSR and Zero JavaScript by Default
Glorics sites are built on a Headless SSR architecture designed specifically to solve the JavaScript bloat problem.
The fundamental principle is zero JavaScript by default. Every page is pre-rendered server-side as pure HTML. No client framework. No React runtime. No Virtual DOM. The browser receives static HTML, immediately displayable, with zero JavaScript to parse.
When a page needs interactivity — a form, a dynamic button, an interactive component — we use the Islands architecture: only the interactive component loads its JavaScript, and only when it's visible on screen. The rest of the page stays pure HTML.
What this looks like in practice:
A typical WordPress site loads 2 to 4 MB of JavaScript and displays the main content (LCP) in 3 to 5 seconds on mobile 4G.
A Glorics site loads between 0 and 50 KB of JavaScript and displays the main content in under a second. LCP is dominated by server response time (TTFB), not JavaScript parsing — because there's almost nothing to parse.
The impact on all three metrics:
LCP drops because the HTML arrives pre-rendered. The browser only needs to paint, not compute. Target: under 1.5 seconds on mobile.
INP becomes near-zero because there's no JavaScript framework blocking the main thread. Clicks respond in under 50 milliseconds. Google's target is 200ms — we're four times below that.
CLS is at zero because the layout is computed server-side. No content that "pops" in after the fact, no images without dimensions, no ads shifting text. The HTML arrives complete and stable.
6. The Middleware: Speed in Service of Entities
Speed without semantic content is an empty site that loads fast. Semantic content without speed is a Knowledge Graph nobody sees.
At Glorics, the two are linked by the Glorics middleware. The same pipeline that serves ultra-fast pages injects the JSON-LD — the Knowledge Graph built in the Entity Builder — into the <head> of every page. In a single HTTP response, the AI agent receives:
Pre-rendered HTML, loaded in under a second, with optimal LCP.
A complete @graph JSON-LD with the brand's entities — Organization, Person, Product, FAQPage, Event — all linked by stable @id references and Wikidata connections.
The agent doesn't need two requests. No need to wait for JavaScript to finish executing to find the structured data. Everything is there, in the initial HTML, in under a second. It's the convergence of performance and semantic intelligence.
7. What Competitors Can't Copy
Any agency can optimize a WordPress site to improve its Core Web Vitals. Compress images, minify CSS, lazy-load scripts. It takes time, costs money, and the gains are fragile — the next plugin update, the next widget the client installs, and everything needs to be redone.
What competitors can't copy is an architecture where speed is structural.
A Glorics SSR site is fast by default. Not because we applied 47 optimizations after the fact, but because the architecture itself doesn't generate technical debt. Zero unnecessary JavaScript. No plugins stacking scripts. No themes loading 300 KB CSS frameworks. The HTML is pure, pre-rendered, and immediately served.
And this architecture is also what allows the middleware to inject JSON-LD entities at zero performance cost. JSON-LD is text in the <head> — it doesn't slow anything down, doesn't shift anything, doesn't block anything. It's pure data, served at server speed.
Speed is not a competitive advantage you "buy" once. It's a property of the infrastructure. At Glorics, it's written into the code.
The Bottom Line
In 2026, speed is the first filter. Before content, before backlinks, before entities — if your page doesn't load in under 2.5 seconds, you're already eliminated. Eliminated from page 1 by Google. Eliminated from Discover. Eliminated by buyer agents with a 200ms timeout.
Core Web Vitals are not a technical problem to solve. They're an architectural question to ask on day one.
A WordPress site optimized after the fact is a 1990s car with a turbo bolted on. It goes faster, but the frame wasn't designed for it. The next plugin installed, the next theme update, and the turbo blows off.
A Glorics site is an electric car. Speed isn't an accessory — it's the engine.
Glorics. Glory Through Physics.
Test your site's speed
Open PageSpeed Insights, type in your URL, and compare your Core Web Vitals against Google's thresholds. If you're in the red, let's talk.
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