[Guide] Core Web Vitals: What They Are and How to Improve Them

Core Web Vitals, a set of web performance metrics from Google, play a critical role in determining user experience and search engine rankings by focusing on three main areas: speed, interactivity, and visual stability of web pages. The metrics include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP), each designed to measure specific aspects of page performance. Improving these metrics can enhance user experience, reduce bounce rates, and increase engagement, which in turn can lead to better SEO rankings and more organic traffic. Developers can use tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights and Lighthouse to measure and optimize these metrics, employing strategies such as asynchronous loading of resources, lazy-loading offscreen content, and minimizing main thread work to enhance responsiveness. The article also highlights how the headless CMS Prismic aids in optimizing Core Web Vitals by leveraging modern frontend frameworks and automating image optimization, allowing developers to focus on building efficient, performance-optimized websites.