Core Web Vitals are a set of Google metrics that measure what real visitors experience on a web page in loading, interactivity and visual stability.
They belong to Web Vitals, an initiative by Google. In the words of web.dev, Google's site for developers, Core Web Vitals are the subset that applies to all web pages, should be measured by all site owners and will be surfaced across all Google tools.
For each of the three areas the Google Search documentation names, web.dev sets a target for a good user experience:
- Loading: LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of the page first starting to load.
- Interactivity: INP should be 200 milliseconds or less.
- Visual stability: CLS should be 0.1 or less.
To make sure most users hit these targets, web.dev recommends measuring at the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop. The figures can come from two kinds of data. Field data comes from monitoring Monitoring Monitoring is the checking of IT components against defined thresholds, so that a notification or an alarm is triggered when a threshold is reached. Read in the glossary → all users who visit a page. Lab data comes from loading a page in a controlled environment, and Chrome tools that report lab data generally run Lighthouse Lighthouse Lighthouse is an open-source tool that automatically checks web pages for performance, accessibility, SEO and more, under controlled lab conditions rather than with real visitors. .
Google's ranking systems do use Core Web Vitals, according to its page experience documentation, but good results in its reports or in third-party tools do not guarantee top rankings. We use Core Web Vitals to judge success alongside rankings, organic traffic and clean indexing, and we monitor performance continuously.
Where the term appears
See also
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Monitoring
Monitoring is the checking of IT components against defined thresholds, so that a notification or an alarm is triggered when a threshold is reached.
Cross-cutting
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SEO
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the work of helping search engines understand a site's content and helping people find the site through search and decide whether to visit it.
E-commerce
Sources
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Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results (opens in a new tab)
Google Search Central accessed
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Web Vitals (opens in a new tab)
web.dev (Google Chrome) accessed
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Why lab and field data can be different (and what to do about it) (opens in a new tab)
web.dev (Google Chrome) accessed
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Nutzerfreundlichkeit von Seiten in den Google-Suchergebnissen (opens in a new tab)
Google Search Central accessed