Signs it is time to revisit Core Web Vitals

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few signals that Core Web Vitals is due some attention.

Speed is a feature people notice only in its absence, and then they leave rather than complain. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Google measures loading, interactivity, and visual stability
• Largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds is the bar

How to approach it

Field data from real visitors beats lab scores. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.