Core Web Vitals for people who don't want to learn them

Google judges your site’s real-world speed using three numbers called Core Web Vitals. They sound technical. They aren’t really.

LCP, Largest Contentful Paint

What it measures: how long until the biggest visible thing on the page is there.

In English: how long until the page feels loaded.

Target: under 2.5 seconds.

Usually broken by: huge hero images, slow servers, or a stack of third-party scripts fighting for bandwidth.

Quickest fix: compress that hero image, lazy-load below-the-fold images, serve static assets from a CDN.

INP, Interaction to Next Paint

What it measures: when you click or tap something, how long before the page actually reacts.

In English: is the page responsive, or does it feel like you’re poking a corpse?

Target: under 200 ms.

Usually broken by: heavy JavaScript blocking the main thread. Often a carousel library, a chat widget, or an analytics tag that decided to parse 400kb of JSON on page load.

Quickest fix: audit third-party scripts. Kill the ones nobody uses.

CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift

What it measures: how much the page jumps around as it loads.

In English: have you ever gone to tap a button and the page shifted and you tapped an ad instead? That’s CLS.

Target: under 0.1.

Usually broken by: images without width/height attributes, ads loading in, fonts swapping late.

Quickest fix: set width and height on every image. Use font-display: optional on web fonts.

What you actually need to do

Open the Google Search Console for your site. Go to “Core Web Vitals”. It will tell you, plainly, which URLs are “Good”, “Needs improvement” and “Poor”. Start with the Poor URLs. Fix one metric at a time.

If you host with us and this list is giving you a headache, it’s the kind of thing our Care plans pick up as part of the quarterly report. We don’t do SEO strategy, but we do the technical plumbing that makes Google like your site better.