Google measures how fast and stable your pages feel. What LCP, INP and CLS mean in plain words, how to check yours, and the fixes that make the biggest difference.
A slow website costs you enquiries. Visitors leave pages that take too long to appear or jump around while loading, and Google uses page experience as one of the signals in its search results. Core Web Vitals are the three measurements Google uses to describe that experience. You do not need to be technical to understand them.
The three measurements
| Metric | What it measures | Good |
|---|---|---|
| LCP — Largest Contentful Paint | How long until the main content (usually the big image or heading) is visible | 2.5 seconds or less |
| INP — Interaction to Next Paint | How quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks | 200 milliseconds or less |
| CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift | How much the page jumps around while loading | 0.1 or less |
Google looks at real visits over the last 28 days, and a page passes when at least three out of four visits meet each threshold.
How to check your website
- PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev): enter a page address to see real-visitor data and a lab test with suggestions.
- Google Search Console: the Core Web Vitals report groups your pages into good, needs improvement and poor.
Test your most important pages — the home page, your main service pages and your contact or quote page — on mobile first. Most visitors arrive on a phone.
Quick fixes that make the biggest difference
For a slow LCP
- Compress and resize images. Serve modern formats such as WebP, and never send a 4,000-pixel photo to a phone.
- Load the main image first. Mark the hero image as high priority and lazy-load the images further down the page.
- Use caching. Page caching and browser caching mean returning visitors and repeat requests are served almost instantly.
- Fast hosting with PHP OPcache (for PHP sites) and a server close to your visitors.
For a poor INP
- Remove plugins and scripts you no longer use, especially old chat widgets and trackers.
- Load third-party scripts only after the page is usable, or only after cookie consent.
- Avoid heavy work in the browser on every click — sliders and animations should be light.
For a high CLS
- Give every image and video a fixed width and height so space is reserved before it loads.
- Reserve space for banners, cookie notices and embedded content.
- Self-host fonts and preload the main ones so text does not jump when the font arrives.
What we do on every website we build
Images are converted to WebP in several sizes, with width and height set; scripts load without blocking the page; fonts are self-hosted and preloaded; and finished pages are cached so they are served in milliseconds. Speed is part of the build, not an afterthought.
When to get help
If your site fails the checks on most pages, the cause is usually the theme, too many plugins or the hosting rather than a single setting. Our website maintenance and support service includes speed audits and fixes, and a rebuild is sometimes the faster path for an old site.
