Core Web Vitals measure three things your visitors physically feel. How fast the main content shows up, how quickly the page reacts when they tap or click, and how much it shifts around while it loads. Google uses them as a ranking signal, but the better reason to care is that they are a decent proxy for whether your site feels good to use. Improving them is mostly about images, fonts, layout stability and cutting scripts you do not need. Here is what moves each one.

Largest Contentful Paint: make the main thing appear faster

LCP is usually your hero image or headline. The fixes are unglamorous and effective: serve images at the size they actually display, use modern formats, lean on a fast host and a CDN, and do not stack heavy media above the fold. If the first thing people see is a large unoptimised image, that is almost always your problem.

Interaction to Next Paint: make it respond quickly

INP is about responsiveness. It suffers when the browser is busy running heavy JavaScript, often from third-party scripts you added once and forgot: chat widgets, trackers, embeds. Audit what you load, remove what you do not use, and defer what can wait. Every script you drop is responsiveness you get back.

Cumulative Layout Shift: stop the page jumping

CLS is the annoying jump when an image or embed loads and pushes everything down. The fix is to reserve the space in advance: set dimensions on images and embeds, and load fonts in a way that does not reflow the text. It is a small amount of discipline that removes a real irritation.

A note on Framer, and how to measure

A lot of this is handled for you on a well-built Framer site: a CDN, image optimisation and sensible defaults come with it. You can still hurt your scores with oversized media or heavy embeds, so the discipline still applies. To see where you stand, run your pages through PageSpeed Insights and watch the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console, which uses real visitor data rather than a lab test.

If your site is slow and you would rather not chase it yourself, book a discovery call and we will get it fast, or build it fast from the start.