Core Web Vitals are Google's way of measuring real-world page experience, and they've become table stakes for competitive local search. With Interaction to Next Paint (INP) now the responsiveness metric, a lot of sites that used to pass are quietly failing. Here's what to measure and how to fix the usual culprits.
The three metrics and their targets
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): under 2.5 seconds — how fast the main content appears.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): under 200 milliseconds — how responsive the page feels to taps and clicks.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): under 0.1 — how much the layout jumps around while loading.
The most common LCP killer: images
Oversized hero images are the number-one reason local sites fail LCP. Serve modern formats (WebP or AVIF), resize images to the dimensions they actually display at, compress aggressively, and never lazy-load the largest above-the-fold image. Adding fetchpriority to the hero helps the browser prioritize it.
Fixing CLS: reserve space
Layout shift usually comes from images and embeds without dimensions, and from web fonts swapping in. Always set width and height on images, reserve space for ads and embeds, and load fonts with a strategy that avoids a jarring reflow.
Fixing INP: reduce main-thread work
INP suffers when heavy JavaScript blocks the main thread while a user is trying to interact. Split large bundles, defer non-critical scripts, and avoid shipping code for the whole site on every page. Prerendered or statically generated pages have a real advantage here.
Compress your images, set dimensions on everything, and keep JavaScript lean. Those three habits fix the vast majority of Core Web Vitals failures on local business sites.
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