Core Web Vitals

Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. A poor score doesn't usually cause a dramatic ranking collapse on its own, but it is a measurable disadvantage — and it reflects real experience problems that cost you visitors regardless of where you rank.

The more direct cost is conversion. A page that takes more than 2.5 seconds to show its main content loses a significant share of visitors before they've read anything. A page that shifts its layout as it loads causes mis-clicks and broken trust.

Unlike server-level metrics (time to first byte, error rates), Core Web Vitals measure the experience from the visitor's perspective — not how quickly your server responds, but how quickly the page becomes genuinely usable.

1. Open PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and enter your URL. It will report your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) scores from real visitor data where available.
2. Check LCP first. This is the time until the page's main image or text block appears. Under 2.5 seconds is good; above 4 seconds is poor. If it's slow, the culprit is usually a large hero image without explicit dimensions, or render-blocking CSS and fonts.
3. Check CLS next. This measures how much the page jumps around while loading. Under 0.1 is good; above 0.25 is poor. The most common cause is images without width and height attributes, or ads and embeds that inject themselves into the layout after the page has already painted.
4. Check INP last. This measures how quickly the page reacts when a visitor clicks or taps. Under 200 ms is good; above 500 ms is poor. Heavy JavaScript running on the main thread is almost always the root cause.
5. The Kweri audit runs PageSpeed Insights automatically and surfaces all three scores in the Performance section of your report — if you've run an audit, you already have this data.