Core Web Vitals are Google's measures of how fast, responsive and stable a page feels to real visitors. They're one ranking signal among many, so great scores won't rescue weak content. But slow, jumpy pages lose visitors and conversions, and on competitive searches every signal counts.
The three metrics, and the targets
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the main content appears. Aim for 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds to taps and clicks. Aim for 200 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the layout jumps around while loading. Aim for 0.1 or less.
Google judges each page by the experience of the 75th percentile of real visitors, so check your field data in Search Console or PageSpeed Insights, not just a lab test on a fast laptop.
Fixing slow LCP
- Find the LCP element. It's usually a hero image or headline.
- Serve images in modern formats like WebP or AVIF, sized for the screen.
- Don't lazy-load the hero image. Preload it, or give it a high fetch priority.
- Cut server response time with caching and a CDN.
Fixing layout shift
Most shifts come from images and embeds without set dimensions, late-loading ads or banners, and web fonts swapping in. Give every image a width and height, reserve space for anything that loads later, and choose font loading settings that keep text sizes stable.
Fixing slow interactions
Poor INP usually means too much JavaScript. Remove unused scripts, delay non-essential third-party tags such as chat widgets and trackers until after the page is interactive, and break long tasks into smaller chunks so the browser can respond in between.
