Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals show where slow loading costs you visitors and rankings. Fixes start with the causes that weigh most.
Page speed as a ranking factor
Slow pages lose visitors before the content appears. Relevance and quality carry more weight in rankings, but between comparable pages load time can tip the balance.
The three metrics
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): time until the main content is visible, good at 2.5 seconds or less
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): response to clicks and input, good at 200 milliseconds or less. INP replaced FID in March 2024.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the layout shifts while loading, good below 0.1
Google uses real user data from the Chrome UX Report. The value that counts is the one reached by 75% of page views.
Common causes
LCP suffers from large images, slow servers and render-blocking resources. Heavy JavaScript, often from tracking and chat widgets, worsens INP. CLS comes from images without fixed dimensions, late-loading banners and web fonts.
Measures
Images in current formats, responsive and loaded by priority
Critical CSS first, remaining resources deferred
Leaner, split JavaScript and reviewed third-party scripts
Caching, CDN and short server response times
Fixed placeholders for images, embeds and ad slots
Image processing, caching and lean front ends are standard in our Statamic and Laravel projects.
Approach
Field data from Search Console and the Chrome UX Report is combined with lab tests in Lighthouse and WebPageTest. Gains show up in field data with a delay, because Google collects it over 28 days. Performance budgets stop new features from undoing the gains.