What to ask your agency about Core Web Vitals

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on Core Web Vitals, these questions are worth asking early.

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Google measures loading, interactivity, and visual stability. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Field data from real visitors beats lab scores. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

In practice

Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. Three things worth confirming about Core Web Vitals before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Field data from real visitors beats lab scores — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.