Does Core Web Vitals Matter? What Do They Do?

Last Updated on 26/10/2025

Suppose you’re browsing the web for information about a product or service. You open a webpage, but it takes ages to load. When it ultimately loads, you attempt to click a button, but the website fails to respond immediately.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the information on the website begins to shift around unexpectedly, making it difficult to read or click on anything.

That seems like a frustrating experience, doesn’t it?

That is exactly the kind of horrible user experience Google wants to avoid with Core Web Vitals.

Core Web Vitals are three indicators that Google uses to evaluate a website’s loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. In other words, they help determine whether a website provides a positive or negative user experience.

So, why do these Core Web Vitals matter?

Google aims to ensure that the websites it suggests in its search results provide a pleasant user experience. After all, if a website is slow, unresponsive, and graphically unstable, you’re not likely to stay for long.

That is why websites with higher Core Web Vitals ratings may appear higher in Google search results, giving them an edge in gaining more visitors and prospective customers.

We will discuss about what are core web vitals.

Do core web vitals matter and have an impact on user experience and search?

Let’s begin!

What Are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals is a set of Google-created criteria for evaluating how effectively a website performs and delivers a positive user experience.

Think of it as a website report card. It analyses the factors essential to everyone viewing a website.

The three core web vitals are:

• Largest Contentful Paint: This measures how quickly the main content on a website’s pages loads. LCP should be less than 2.5 seconds to ensure a positive user experience. Nobody loves gazing at a blank screen, waiting for anything to occur.

• Cumulative Layout Shift: This analyzes how often the layout and information on a page change around unexpectedly while it is still loaded. CLS should be less than 0.1 to offer a good user experience. Content moving around makes it difficult to read, and you may mistakenly click the wrong thing.

• First Input Delay: This metric measures how quickly a website responds when you click or interact with it. Delays and latency may be worsening quite a bit. FID should be less than 100 milliseconds for optimal user experience.

Google has revealed that a fourth metric, Interaction to Next Paint (INP), would replace FID as part of Core Web Vitals in March 2024. INP should be 200 milliseconds or less to ensure a quick, responsive experience.

So, in simple terms, Core Web Vitals are Google’s way of measuring whether a website loads quickly, responds to user interactions, and avoids unexpected layout changes.

Why Do Core Web Vitals Matter?

As of June 2021, Google considers Page Experience an official ranking factor. Page Experience is a set of elements that Google considers important for providing an excellent overall consumer experience. These include the following:

• Using HTTPS to serve your page
• Mobile-friendliness
• The absence of distracting interstitials (annoying pop-ups)
• Safe-browsing

Core Web Vitals are important because they directly affect user engagement, satisfaction, and website conversion rates. If a site performs poorly on Core Web Vitals, users are likely to have a negative experience.

Here are some important reasons why you should worry about Core Web Vitals:

a. Happy Users

Users are more satisfied when the site runs smoothly. Good Core Web Vitals indicators lead to happy users.

b. Lower Bounce Rate

Pages with a quick LCP and low CLS keep users on the page for longer periods before they bounce.

c. Higher Conversions

A responsive site with a strong FID increases users’ chances of completing a transaction or signing up for a service.

d. Improved SEO

Pages that provide users with an enjoyable experience tend to rank higher in search results. Core Web Vitals are a ranking metric.

e. Increased Revenue

A direct link exists between enhanced Core Web Vitals and increased revenue, driven by stronger engagement and conversion rates. Google also includes Core Web Vitals in its ranking factors.

As a result, optimizing these metrics can help your website rank higher in search results and attract more visitors.

What are the Recommended Criteria For Core Web Vitals Metrics?

a. Largest Contentful Paint

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of three key web vitals metrics that evaluate a website’s user experience. LCP particularly measures how soon the primary content of a webpage loads and becomes accessible to the user.

Simply, LCP evaluates how long it takes for the largest, most essential visual element on the website to load and show. This might be a large picture, video player, text block, or any other important piece of information that viewers expect to see first when they visit that page.

A good LCP time is 2.5 seconds or less. This means that when a user visits the website, the main picture, video, or important block of text loads almost instantly. An LCP of 2.6 to 4 seconds indicates that your site’s speed needs improvement.

Anything longer than 4 seconds is considered bad LCP. Because it can annoy visitors and cause them to quit your site.

From a technological standpoint, optimizing LCP may include tactics like:

• Optimizing and reducing big media files
• Prioritizing key resource loading
• Using techniques for performance, like code splitting
• Effective use of browser caching

b. Cumulative Layout Shift

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is another Core Web Vitals metric introduced by Google. It assesses a website’s visual stability.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a consistent Core Web Vitals metric. It is an essential, user-centered metric for analyzing visual stability, as it measures how often users experience unexpected layout changes. A low CLS helps ensure the page is pleasant.

Unexpected layout changes may interrupt the user experience in a variety of ways, including causing them to lose their place while reading if the text jumps unexpectedly, or to click the wrong link or button. In certain circumstances, this can cause considerable harm.

A great CLS score of 0.1 or less indicates that your website layout is quite stable. This allows people to easily see your content without interruption.

A CLS score of 0.1 to 0.25 indicates that your website’s visual stability needs improvement. There is enough movement to be apparent to users.

A bad CLS score of more than 0.25 indicates that your page elements move around a much. Users may notice sudden shifts, such as text or buttons moving. This is harmful to their experience. 

c. First Input Delay

First Input Delay (FID) is the third metric in Google’s Core Web Vitals. It assesses a website’s responsiveness to user interactions. FID measures how quickly a website responds when a user first interacts with it.

Examples of interaction include:

• Selecting a menu item in a dropdown
• Clicking a link from your site’s navigation
• Entering their email address into a form field
• Open the “accordion menu” on a mobile device

Google values FID because it reflects how easily real-world customers can interact with your website. FID should be less than 100 milliseconds for the best user experience. 

d. Interaction to Next Paint

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is the most recent Core Web Vitals measure, succeeding First Input Delay (FID) on March 12, 2024. It represents how quickly a page reacts to interactions and is measured in milliseconds.

It is worth noting that INP measures how quickly a webpage responds during user interaction. FID only tracked the response time of the first user contact with any element on the site. 

A good INP is 200 milliseconds or less. An INP between 200 and 500 milliseconds indicates that your site’s interaction needs enhancing.

An INP of more than 500 milliseconds represents a horrible interactive experience for your users. This involves obvious lags and delays in responding to user inputs.

How to Check Your Site’s Core Web Vitals Performance?

CWVs can be checked using a variety of tools. All of the offerings directly from Google are listed below:

The Chrome UX Report (CrUX) provides field data from Chrome users, allowing site administrators to learn how real people interact with their websites.

Google Lighthouse is a free application that generates lab measurements for CWVs. It provides useful data on performance, SEO, and accessibility, among other things.

Google PageSpeed Insights combines the features of CrUX and Lighthouse, providing field and lab data on CWVs and other web metrics. PageSpeed Insights allows users to assess the performance of websites, whether or not they own them. This is an example of a PageSpeed Insights report.

Google Search Console is based on CrUX field data and provides CWV performance statistics by URL or set of URLs.

Let’s check core web vitals using one of the tools:

a. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool for assessing the performance of a single webpage on mobile and desktop devices.

It also offers ways to make your page quicker and simpler to use. To measure a page’s Core Web Vitals performance, open PageSpeed Insights, input the URL you wish to examine, and click “Analyze.”

When your report is done, you will receive a full breakdown of your performance across many parameters.

The “Performance” score runs from 0 to 100 and is based on the following metrics:

• First Contentful Paint 
• Speed Index
• Largest Contentful Paint
• Total Blocking Time
• Cumulative Layout Shift

Your Core Web Vitals findings look like this:

Scroll down to the “Diagnostics” section for a list of things you can do to boost your site’s performance. 

Keep in mind that the Core Web Vitals report isn’t intended to help you determine the status of a particular page. Instead, it lets you assess your website’s overall health.

How to Improve Core Web Vitals Performance?

a. Improving LCP

Use a content delivery network (CDN): CDNs cache material in several places across the world, allowing content to reach consumers more rapidly.

Optimize images: Images tend to be the largest element on a page. Reducing the size of an image file can speed up its loading time.

Another option to boost your LCP score is to boost your site hosting.

Shared hosting (where multiple sites are hosted on the same server) may be slower because resources, such as memory and processing power, are shared. As a result, when other sites have traffic surges, your site may slow down. 

To solve this, consider switching to a better hosting plan or an alternative hosting provider. For example, dedicated hosting (where your site has its own server) or cloud hosting (where multiple servers are used to provide more consistent performance).

b. Improving CLS

1. Minimize third-party page elements: Third-party elements on a page load from different places than the rest of the page. As a result, they may load at slightly different times, causing the page’s layout to change. Using fewer third-party items reduces the number of layout changes.

2. Reserve space for embedded content: Many third-party features, such as advertisements, are necessary for a website’s operation or economic strategy and cannot be removed. Developers can reserve space on the page for these components to load before the browser retrieves the actual element.

3. Ensure that photos load at their optimal size: This is a slightly different approach than optimizing images in general. Desktop PCs, tablets, and smartphones all require graphics in varying sizes due to screen sizes. If a browser loads the large, desktop-optimized image first and then needs to download the mobile-optimized image because the device is a smartphone, the page content may shift as the different-sized image loads.

4. Include the height and width of photos and videos: The height and width parameters indicate how large an image will be, allowing browsers to reserve that space before the picture or video loads. Our HTML5 video page contains further information on how to achieve this with video.

5. Use CSS aspect ratio boxes:  CSS developers may use a variety of strategies to save space for a page element by leveraging aspect ratios. 

c. Improving INP

One of the most important issues that can degrade your Interaction with Next Paint is the presence of several huge scripts or JavaScript code on your site.

JavaScript is a computer language that creates dynamic website elements such as menus, forms, and animations. However, heavy or complex JavaScript code might slow your website’s response time to user interactions.

So, 

• Reduce the number of JavaScript functions: Code-heavy, dynamic webpages can cause input delays because the browser needs to load all the code before executing it. JavaScript minification can help speed up this process.

• Create static HTML webpages: Static HTML pages load much faster than dynamic ones, particularly when delivered via a CDN. Learn about static site generators, or Jamstack, a development strategy focused on static content.

• Remove any unwanted third-party tools and scripts: Loading extra tools on your website can slow down your site. Reduce the number of third-party tools on a website to increase FID and overall website performance.

Conclusion

So, do core web vitals matter? 

Core Web Vitals absolutely matter when it comes to creating a first-class, hassle-free experience for everybody visiting your website 

While optimizing for these vitals requires some dedicated skills from your web developers, the reward is huge: creating excellent digital experiences that keep customers satisfied and coming back for more. Mastering those Core Web Vitals in 2024 and beyond will be critical to online success.

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