A fast website sells better, gets found more often and keeps visitors on the page longer. Google measures three central values for this, the Core Web Vitals. What is behind them, and how do you improve them?
LCP: Largest Contentful Paint
Measures how long the largest visible element (usually a hero image or a heading) takes to load. Goal: under 2.5 seconds. Common causes of bad values are oversized images, slow server response times or blocking scripts. The most effective levers: modern image formats (WebP, AVIF), preload for the hero image and a host with short response times.
INP: Interaction to Next Paint
Replaced the old FID value in 2024 and measures how quickly the page responds to clicks and inputs. Goal: under 200 milliseconds. Bad values mostly arise from too much JavaScript blocking the main thread. Solutions: split scripts, reduce third-party tags and move intensive calculations into web workers.
CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift
Rates how stable the layout stays during loading. Goal: under 0.1. Jumping content, for example because an advertising banner loads later, annoys visitors and costs conversions. Remedy: reserve fixed sizes for images, iframes and ads, include fonts with font-display: optional or preloaded fonts.
How to measure your values
Free tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse (in Chrome DevTools) or the Chrome User Experience Reports deliver real measured values. Important: in field operation (real visitors) the values are often worse than in the lab test. Look at both perspectives.
Quick wins for more speed
Compress images and deliver them in the right format, enable lazy loading, reduce JavaScript, choose a fast host, use HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, set caching headers correctly: the basic optimisations often already bring the decisive jump in ranking.
When is professional optimisation worthwhile?
If order abandonments increase, bounce rates rise or you slip in the Google ranking, a systematic performance analysis is usually cheaper than any new advertising campaign. solutioIT analyses your website, prioritises the most effective levers and implements them cleanly technically.