Core Web Vitals: what actually matters in 2024
A pragmatic guide to LCP, INP and CLS ā which fixes move the field data, and which are theatre.
Lab data is a hypothesis, field data is the result
A perfect Lighthouse score on a developer laptop tells you very little. Start with the Chrome UX Report for the pages that matter commercially, then use lab tooling to work out why the field numbers look the way they do.
Where the wins usually are
| Metric | Most common cause | Highest-value fix |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | Hero image loaded late or lazily | Preload the actual LCP asset and stop lazy-loading it |
| INP | Long tasks from third-party scripts | Defer or remove non-essential scripts, break up long tasks |
| CLS | Images and embeds without reserved space | Set explicit width and height on every image and iframe |
Priya Raman
Technical SEO Director
Priya leads technical delivery, specialising in large-scale migrations, crawl efficiency and Core Web Vitals.
Expertise
- Technical SEO
- Site Migrations
- Core Web Vitals
- Structured Data
