Measuring soft navigation web vitals

Chrome and Sentry JavaScript SDK v11 now measure Core Web Vitals—including LCP, CLS, and INP—for qualifying soft navigations in single-page applications, extending performance visibility beyond initial page loads to routes users reach during a session. Chrome currently defines soft navigations through user-initiated actions that visibly change the URL and result in a paint, though its heuristics may evolve and are presently available only in Chromium 151 and later. Unlike navigation-span duration, which ends when application activity settles, soft-navigation vitals measure user-facing milestones such as when primary content appears after an interaction and whether the resulting route remains responsive and stable. Sentry attaches these metrics to existing SPA navigation spans by default in v11, separates CLS and INP by route rather than attributing all later activity to the initial page load, and adds dashboard filters for page loads, soft navigations, bfcache restores, and prerenders. Data from Sentry’s application showed that soft navigations accounted for roughly 62% of page views and generally performed faster than page loads, but their scores should not be directly compared because they avoid document requests and existing thresholds were based on page-load data. Developers can use traces to identify whether slow route code downloads, data fetches, or unstable loading placeholders are delaying LCP or increasing CLS, then apply measures such as prefetching, preloading, or resizing placeholders.

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