Scholars distinguish two things that everyday usage now calls by one name. Ladino in the narrow sense is a translation register, not a spoken tongue: a word-for-word rendering of Hebrew scripture into Spanish that follows the Hebrew word order and syntax rather than natural Spanish, so that the reader can see the original through it. It is deliberately unidiomatic, in the same way and for the same reason as the Yiddish taytsh. Printed Bibles, prayer books with facing translation and the Passover Haggadah in the vernacular all used it.
The spoken language, which its speakers more often called Djudezmo or simply Espanyol, was ordinary and idiomatic and carried the rest of life: the romances, ballads brought out of Spain and sung for centuries afterward, the coplas composed for festivals, the proverbs, and eventually a nineteenth century press and a body of novels and plays.
The single most influential book written in it belongs to neither register exactly. The Meam Loez, begun in the early eighteenth century and continued by later hands, is a vast running commentary on the Bible in accessible Judeo-Spanish, gathering rabbinic material for readers who could not work through it in Hebrew. It did for the Sephardic world roughly what the Tsene-rene did for the Ashkenazi one, and it was read aloud in homes and synagogues for two hundred years.
None of this displaced Hebrew from the fixed prayers. Ladino explained, taught and sang. The liturgy stayed where it was.