When Google rolled out Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, it set off a wave of score optimization that often missed the point entirely.
Quick background:
Core Web Vitals are a set of user experience metrics that Google uses as a ranking signal. The three main ones are Largest Contentful Paint (how fast the main content loads), Interaction to Next Paint (how quickly the page responds to user input), and Cumulative Layout Shift (whether the page jumps around as it loads).
Here’s the honest take on how much these actually matter for most sites.
For sites already performing reasonably well on these metrics, chasing incremental score improvements will not move rankings in any meaningful way. Google has been clear that Core Web Vitals are a tiebreaker, not a primary signal. Relevance and authority still drive rankings. A page that scores in the 70s but is clearly the best result for a query will still outrank a technically perfect page with weaker content.
That said, genuinely poor scores do hurt you. A Largest Contentful Paint over four or five seconds is a real problem: for rankings, for conversion rate, and for user experience. Significant layout shift that makes a page hard to use matters. You don’t need a perfect score. You need to be out of the red zone.
The mistake I see most often
Teams spending weeks chasing a score from 78 to 92 when the bigger opportunity is fixing the relevance problems keeping pages off the first page entirely.
Optimize for real user experience. Get your metrics into an acceptable range. Beyond that, your time is almost certainly better spent on content relevance and site architecture than on incremental speed improvements that won’t move the needle on rankings.
