What are Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals by Google are some metrics provided to see how well a website will work for a user. These are important because this is a measurable way to see how well your site works for users.

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) - How long it takes to load the largest element (content) from the page. This is often how users perceive how quickly your site loads.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) - How much movement happens to the page elements when loading. Eg. content moving around as it loads more, making it hard to use.

INP (Interaction to Next Paint) measures the delay between a user interaction (like clicking, tapping, or typing) and the next time the browser visually updates the page in response. This makes a site feel quick or slow depending on your score.

Why are Core Web Vitals Important

All of these can make or break the user's experience, so it’s little surprise why your site’s SEO is affected by your scores.

It’s also worth noting FCP is the First Contentful Paint. It’s often regarded as less important than LCP. It measures the time from when the page starts loading to when the first piece of content—such as text, an image, or an SVG—appears.

Why do Core Web Vitals matter?

Simply put, Core Web Vitals matter because they determine the user's experience. This will affect how long they stay on your site, how much they interact, and ultimately can affect conversions if that's your thing. Each stat plays its part. If your loading time is too slow, a huge number of people will leave (bounce) from your site before even seeing what you have to offer. If INP is too bad, then they won’t interact any more than they have to, causing them to miss out on whatever your site could offer for them. And I think everyone has suffered from CLS before — think, you’re about to click on a button or search box on a site, and suddenly an ad loads right where you clicked, causing you to have your experience broken.

How to check a sites Core Web Vitals

There are quite a few ways, of course we would recommend our tool, which can give you a report and optimizations along with a revenue impact calculator so you can see how your core web vitals might be affecting your business.

You can also check somewhere like Google Page Speed Insights which will give you the same data just without the calculator. This is enough to get started. We'll be writing guides for each of the stats and how to improve them for website performance. All our guides are written by people creating sites everyday.