Core Web Vitals Industry Dashboard

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible to the user when the page first starts loading. The idea is to measure what the user can actually see while the page loads to better capture the user loading experience.

To achieve a “good” score, websites need to have an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less. Google measures whether 75% of page loads achieve this target. In this analysis, we look at LCP at the domain level across an entire month for a more reliable picture of CWV performance.

First Input Delay (FID) measures interactivity of a page. Specifically it measures the time between when a user interacts with a page (click on a link, tapping a button) to when the browser can actually handle this request. The slower the FID, the more laggy a page will feel to a user.

To achieve a good FID score, websites need to keep the interactivity delay of 75% of page loads under 100 ms. At the page level, if 75% of users have to wait less than 100ms to interact with that page, you achieve a good FID score. At the domain level, all pages need to meet this standard for 75% of users.

CLS is a measures image stability. The higher the score, the more images will unexpectedly jump around on a page as it is loading, creating a negative user experience.

At the page level, Google awards a “good” score if 75% of page loads have a CLS score of 0.1 or less. At the domain level, 75% of all page loads across your domain would need to be 0.1 or below.

1. Analyze and monitor – start by analyzing your own performance. One of the easiest ways to do this is head to PageSpeed Insights and type in your URL. The Search Console (Core Web Vitals report) is another way
2. Identify problem pages – look for pages with poor Core Web Vitals performance. If you are unsure where to focus your efforts, start with your most revenue-critical pages such as landing pages from paid campaigns, or organic product pages.
3. Use best practices to optimize – we have gathered a few best practices and guides grouped by each Core Web Vital metric and level of difficulty.

There are many ways to track and analyze Core Web Vitals. The easiest and quickest way is to use either PageSpeed Insights or Search Console.

Beginner

• Using the Chrome UX Report on PageSpeed Insights
• Search Console (Core Web Vitals report)

Intermediate

• Track Core Web Vitals with Google Analytics

Advanced

• Using the Chrome UX Report to look at performance in the field
• Using the CrUX Dashboard on Data Studio
• Using the Chrome UX Report on BigQuery
• Using the Chrome UX Report API

LCP measures the loading time for the largest element on a page. Reducing the size of this element and the time it takes a browser to render this element are key ways of improving LCP.

Best practices

• Compress images using tools like Squoosh
• Choose the right image format – PNG is known for lossless compression, while WebP is a modern format developed by Google that can reduce image size.
• Use responsive design by serving different image sizes to different devices
• Consider replacing videos with thumbnail images
• Reduce render-blocking resources (see resources below)
• Lazy loading – only load the images, videos and resources above the fold, and load everything else in the background

Resources/Guides

General

• Optimize LCP deep dive

Intermediate

• Optimize your CSS
• Optimize your Images
• Optimize web Fonts

Advanced

• Apply instant loading with the PRPL pattern
• Optimizing the Critical Rendering Path
• Optimize your JavaScript (for client-rendered sites)

FID measures interactivity – the time between a user requesting a page and being able to click and scroll on page elements. A key way of improving FID is reducing render-blocking resources (typically JavaScript)

Best practices

• Only load the resources necessary for page render and asynchronously load everything else (see guides below)
• Consider inlining critical CSS and JS

Resources/Guides

General

• Optimize FID deep dive

Advanced

• Efficiently load third-party JavaScript
• Reduce the impact of third-party code
• Reduce JavaScript execution time
• Minimize main thread work
• Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small

CLS measures when layout elements such as images, banners or ads cause a shift in layout unexpectedly for the user. To avoid CLS, it is crucial to have robust layouts with correctly-sized elements.

Best practices

• Use placeholders to reserve the necessary space for dynamic layout elements such as images and banners.
• Correctly specify image size attributes
• Don’t overlay content above existing content, except in response to user interactions.
• Avoid animations of properties that trigger layout changes.

Resources/Guides

General 

• CLS deep dive
• Debug layout shifts
• Minimizing layout shift
• Understanding Cumulative Layout Shift

Layout

• Common tricky layout implementations (many useful examples of carousels, responsive images and video players correctly implemented without causing CLS)

Core Web Vitals performance data is taken from the Chrome User Experience Report. This report updates its data on the second Tuesday of every month for the previous month. Data is aggregated across an entire domain, not on the page level. CrUX data is based on real user interactions – this is sometimes called field data, for example in the Pagespeed Insights API.

The top 100 domains are determined based on Searchmetrics’ SEO Visibility metric that analyzes total expected traffic based on all keywords and their SERP positions that a domain ranks for. This data is device and country-specific.

For the industry breakdown, a keyword set was defined for each of the 8 industries. This keyword set was tracked in the Searchmetrics Suite and a traffic share analysis was performed to establish the top 100 domains by industry and device.

To calculate the average values across the entire US CrUX dataset, each domain that had a recorded value for all 3 Core Web Vitals metrics was aggregated, treating desktop and mobile separately.

All metrics shown in this report are in the 75th percentile. This is the same as the metrics Google displays in PageSpeed tests under “Origin Summary”. For example, if a domain has an LCP of 2.4 seconds, then 75% of all visits to that domain across the entire month were quicker than 2.4 seconds.