Three numbers, one feeling
Core Web Vitals are Google’s way of measuring one thing: does this page feel like it is working? Three measurements stand in for it, and all three are things a real visitor notices without knowing the terminology.
LCP — does something appear?
Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the main thing on the page shows up. People interpret blank as broken. In practice it is almost always a hero image that was exported far too large, or a server slow to send the first byte.
INP — does it respond when I click?
Interaction to Next Paint: the delay between your click and the page visibly responding. A laggy-feeling site is usually a lot of JavaScript running on click handlers, or a theme shipping a builder framework to pages that do not need it.
CLS — does it stay still?
Cumulative Layout Shift: how much the page jumps around while loading. Almost always images without dimensions and web fonts swapping in late. It is the metric users describe as “janky” or “cheap”.
The fixes that move the numbers
- Shrink the images. Most sites serve images several times larger than the screen needs. Resizing is usually the single biggest win available.
- Cache properly. If the same page does full work on every visit, turn on page caching. This is the boring fix that beats clever fixes.
- Give images dimensions so the layout does not jump.
- Self-host or limit fonts, and use fewer of them.
- Delete plugins that do nothing. Every plugin is JavaScript somebody has to maintain. We find unused ones on most audits.
- Measure on a real phone on mobile data, not a laptop on office wifi. Desktop numbers are comforting and wrong.
What it costs
A WordPress speed and security audit with the top five fixes applied is $99; a targeted Core Web Vitals fix is $149. Our why your WooCommerce store is slow.
And the security half of this is the same job: an unmaintained WordPress with a plugin backlog is not a performance problem waiting to happen, it is a security problem that already has.
Next step
Send the URL of the page that feels slow. You will get the audit and the fixed price: Which page on your site do visitors complain about most?