Soft navigations

Soft navigations are often produced by client side rendered websites or webapps, such as Single Page Applications. Instead of going to a new page, the contents of the clicked link is being fetched and inserted into the current page in case of soft navigations. On top of that, the url will change dynamically and a developer is responsible to also take care of technical SEO/crawlability as well as analytics tracking.

However, as soft navigations aren't default browser pagehits, the performance APIs aren't treating them as new page views. As a result:

• any CLS happening on such pages might add up to the CLS of the previous page;
• LCP of new pageviews aren't tracked and won't average out overall LCP.