· By Tomás Reyes · 1 min read
What a fast website is worth, in plain English
Core Web Vitals without the jargon: what they measure, what good looks like and three fixes that help almost every site.
Google measures three things about how your pages feel, and calls them Core Web Vitals. They matter for search, but they matter more for people.
The three numbers
- Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the main thing appears. Aim for under 2.5 seconds on a phone.
- Interaction to Next Paint: how quickly the page responds when you tap. Under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: how much things jump around while loading. Under 0.1.
Three fixes that help almost everyone
- Serve images in AVIF or WebP, at the size they’re shown.
- Load fonts from your own domain and preload the one above the fold.
- Delete scripts nobody remembers adding. There’s always one.
Our launches this year load in a median of 1.1 seconds on a mid-range phone. It’s not magic: it’s saying no to things.