General Core Web Vitals FAQ

How to get a free Core Web Vitals report?

As real user experience data as saved within CrUX report, most data is for free. You could check out the Core Web Vitals section within your Google Search Console, you could use Core Web Vitals, the free CrUX setup or you could query BigQuery yourself.

Do note that you will only see data when your website or webshop has sufficient visitors. Ready to monitor and optimize? Get your CrUX report for free by filling in your domain name.

Is PageSpeed Insights the best performance tooling to use?

Compaired to Pingdom tools or GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights is the better performance testing tool. On top of technical recommendations, PageSpeed Insights will also give you insights into the impact on user experience via their six metrics. See also Why you should use PageSpeed Insights, instead of GTmetrix or Pingdom.

Which metrics are new within Core Web Vitals?

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are new, as we already had the First Contentful Paint (FCP) metric within previous PageSpeed Insights and thus Lighthouse versions.

Why were new metrics introduced?

Other metrics such as First Meaningful Paint (FMP) or Time to Interactive (TTI) didn't tell a story about the first and thus early user engagement. Moreover, third parties that would impact TTI could be loaded without massively impacting the user experience.

At the same time, the web kept growing, impacting UX even more, despite the existing metrics. This is where Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) comes in, ranking the layout stability while visiting a webpage. First Meaningful Paint wasn't reliable metric as a test could not figure out which elements really were meaningful. This is why FMP got replaced by Largest Contentful Paint.

Will new metrics become part of Core Web Vitals?

This is very much possible. It is already being said that animation performance could become part of the Core Web Vitals, as bad animation performance which takes place on the CPU of your device, could impact user experience, depending on other (busy) tasks that are executed by the browser.

However, Google stated that no more than one metric per year will be replaced or introduced.

Where can I find any updates on the Web Vitals metrics?