Core Web Vitals are Google's measure of real-world page experience — scoring load speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Poor scores directly impact your search rankings. A page that loads slowly, jumps around as it loads, or takes too long to respond will be deprioritised by Google regardless of how good the content is. Technical performance and SEO are inseparable.
Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console's Core Web Vitals report are both free. PageSpeed Insights scores your site for desktop and mobile, identifying specific issues and prioritising fixes by impact. Search Console tracks your Core Web Vitals performance over time across your entire site. Between the two, you have everything needed to diagnose and monitor your page experience scores.
Aim for a green score of 90 or above in Google PageSpeed Insights — particularly on mobile. Google prioritises mobile performance when ranking pages, so if your site loads fast on a phone, desktop will take care of itself. A green mobile score signals to Google that your page delivers a quality experience and deserves to rank.
The biggest culprits are hero images, image carousels, and video — the first elements to load and the most likely to fail. A visitor waiting for an expensive video that never loads will leave before seeing it. Fix these first using WebP images and WebM video, then work through remaining issues flagged in your Core Web Vitals report systematically.
It depends on your starting point. Moving from average to good Core Web Vitals can deliver around 10% improvement in rankings — poor to good can exceed 20%. But performance is one factor among many. Authority, content quality, and keyword competitiveness all play a role. The weaker your Core Web Vitals are right now, the more improvement fixing them will deliver.
It depends on the platform and how poor the scores are. On CoreDNA, fixes are typically minor tweaks — the standardised codebase and modern file format support mean serious Core Web Vitals issues rarely arise. On WordPress, fixing a single page can take two hours or more. The right platform choice eliminates most performance problems before they need fixing.