What Google actually measures
Core Web Vitals are three numbers Google collects from your real visitors: LCP (how fast the main content appears — under 2.5s is good), INP (how fast the page reacts to taps and clicks — under 200ms), and CLS (whether things jump around while loading — under 0.1). Fail them and you rank lower and convert worse; every 100ms of delay measurably cuts conversion.
The usual suspects
In audit after audit, the same culprits appear: uncompressed hero images, third-party scripts loading before content, fonts that flash or shift layout, and cheap hosting adding half a second before anything starts. None of these require a redesign to fix — they require engineering discipline.
- Serve images in AVIF/WebP, sized to their container
- Defer every script that isn't needed for first paint
- Self-host fonts with size-adjusted fallbacks
- Put a CDN in front of everything
What good looks like
Our builds target 95+ Lighthouse performance as a contractual deliverable, not an aspiration. The UrbanEstate relaunch went from 8-second searches to sub-second interactions — and organic traffic doubled in two months. Speed is SEO, UX, and CRO wearing one costume.
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