What are Core Web Vitals?
Google's three measures of how a page feels to load: how quickly the main content appears, how soon it responds to a tap, and how much it shifts about while loading.
Core Web Vitals are the three measurements Google uses to judge how a page feels to use while it loads. Each has a name that sounds more complicated than the thing it measures.
Largest Contentful Paint is how long the main content takes to appear. Google counts two and a half seconds or less as good. Interaction to Next Paint is how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks, and good is two hundred milliseconds or less. It replaced an older measure, First Input Delay, in March 2024. Cumulative Layout Shift is how much the page jumps about as it loads, the thing that makes you tap the wrong button, and good is a score of 0.1 or less.
They are measured on real visitors using Chrome, not only in a test, which is why a site can look fast on the office broadband and fail on a phone on a train.
They are part of how Google ranks pages, but a small part. A fast page with nothing useful on it will not outrank a slower page that answers the question. Where they really matter is to the visitor, because a slow, jumpy page loses people before they read a word. We go into the wider picture in website speed and SEO.
Search that compounds, run by people who show their work.
Strategy, technical, content, links and local, planned together and reported against the numbers your business cares about.