Core Web Vitals: What Are They and Why You Need to Know About Them?

Looking at new metrics to improve your site’s user experience

Optimizing the user experience on the web is an essential part of any online business that wants to achieve long-term success. And when it comes to optimizing user experience, you usually also hear about performance optimization. The two go hand in hand.

Web vitals is an initiative by Google that aims to help you make the user experience quantifiable, by introducing performance metrics. These metrics can show the overall performance of your site that impacts user experience.

Among these metrics — called web vitals — , the ones that matter the most are called core web vitals. These are key performance metrics that impact user experience the most. There are three metrics that make up core web vitals, focusing on three aspects of the user experience (loading, interactivity, visual stability). Each of them can give you valuable insights on what to improve to enhance your UX. Let’s see them one by one.

Loading

The first metric is related to loading and is called “Largest Contentful Paint” or LCP for short. It measures the time when the main content of your website is fully rendered, meaning your users have something meaningful…