Three metrics decide whether Google considers your page experience good. Here is what each one measures and what actually moves it.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are the three user-experience metrics Google treats as a ranking signal: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift. A page passes when the 75th percentile of real visits is in the good range for all three — so you are judged by your slower users, not your average one.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP is how long it takes for the biggest thing in the viewport — usually a hero image, video poster or headline block — to finish rendering. Good is 2.5s or less. The usual culprits are a slow server response, render-blocking CSS or JavaScript, and hero images that are neither preloaded nor properly sized.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
INP measures how long the page takes to visually respond to a click, tap or key press, across the whole visit — not just the first one. Good is 200ms or less. Long JavaScript tasks are the usual cause: heavy hydration, third-party tags, and event handlers that do layout work synchronously.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS adds up how much visible content jumps around without the user causing it. Good is 0.1 or less. Images and iframes without width and height, ads and embeds injected above existing content, and web fonts that swap to different metrics are what shift a layout.
First Input Delay is retired
FID was replaced by INP in March 2024. FID only measured the delay before the first interaction started processing, which almost every site passed. INP measures the full interaction latency across the whole session, so pages that felt sluggish now score like it.
Field data vs lab data
This tool shows field data: what actual Chrome users on actual devices and networks experienced. Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights' performance score are lab data — one simulated run on one simulated device. Lab data is reproducible and good for debugging; field data is what Google ranks on. You want both, and you want them to agree.
Where these numbers come from
The Chrome UX Report (CrUX) aggregates anonymised measurements from Chrome users who opted into usage statistics reporting. It publishes a 28-day rolling window per URL and per origin. If a specific page has too little traffic, CrUX has no entry for it and we show the origin-level result instead.
Why no field data can be good news
A missing CrUX entry does not mean your site is slow — it means too few Chrome users visited it for Google to publish an aggregate. Newer or lower-traffic sites are in this bucket constantly. Real user monitoring on your own site is how you measure vitals before CrUX has enough of a sample.