Estimated Time to Accomplish: 30-60 minutes
How to check core web vitals for your website. This is a newbie’s guide to checking Google Core Web Vitals for your site to make sure you score the highest you can with Google’s metrics for the best performance and user experience.
A Quick Summary:
In 2020, Google began using metrics for measuring quality websites. These metrics are used to measure site and page performance and user experience. Often it can be hard to score well with these metrics, so here is a beginner’s guide to learning about web core vitals and improving your site.
My recommendation:
Know your site. Know how you rank with Google. Even if it seems hard to improve, the ability to understand what Google wants and how you rank with the ranking factors is vital for a successful website. If you are looking to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, this is the best place to start.
Your next steps:
Read this regardless of what kind of site you have!
Why do you need need to check your Core Web Vitals?
As of January 2025, Google is the most used search engine in the world. Yes, other search engines (Bing, Yahoo, etc.) are rising in popularity. But, if you want to maximize on the most search traffic from a single search engine, you need to understand what Google wants, and how to check core web vitals so your website can perform the best.
According to Google, this should help with your ability to rank in search results. “We highly recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and to ensure a great user experience generally. This, along with other page experience aspects, aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward.”
I have also found that improving my site for better core web vital metrics, has also improved my site loading speed, which is a win-win.
What are the Core Web Vitals?
According to Google for Developers, Core Web Vitals are performance metrics that measure:
- Loading Performance – Measured by determining how quickly the largest visible content element on a page loads
- Responsiveness – Measured by determining how quickly a website responds to user interactions
- Visual Stability – Measured by determining how much page elements move around while loading, affecting visual stability
These are the 3 main Core Web Vitals that Google uses (here):
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, strive to have LCP occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
- Interaction To Next Paint (INP): Measures responsiveness. To provide a good user experience, strive to have an INP of less than 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, strive to have a CLS score of less than 0.1.
If you see any mention of First Input Delay (FID), just ignore. This is a web vital that was discontinued in 2024 and replaced with INP.
How to check Core Web Vitals
Keep reading to find my 4 favorite ways to hwo to check core web vitals on your site.
1. Check Your Site with Google Search Console
(If you don’t yet have Google Search Console set up, stop what you are doing and establish that connection. Connect your site and your Google Analytics to Google Search Console, and come back in a few months when you have live data.)
- First, go to Google Search Console and click your domain name.
- On the left sidebar under “Experience” click “Core Web Vitals”
- This is the best place to start. You will be able to see how your URLs rank for each core web vital for mobile and desktop.
- If you have any poor-ranking URLs, keep reading!

2. Run a Core Web Vitals Test
- Use WebPageTest.org – a free Core Web Vitals Test to examine your site (I recommend testing your homepage and a one of your posts or pages that is not performing well.)
- After the test has run, click “View as a Filmstrip”
- Click “Adjust Filmstring Settings” to ask the core web vitals report to highlight what you want – either layout shifts (CLS) or largest contentful paints (LCP).
- This filmstrip view will highlight issues with your site and tell you if they are causing issues with visual change (INP), layout shift (CLS), or largest contentful paint (LCP).
- You can also scroll down and see highlighted scripts on your site that are causing extra load time or shift.

3. Test with a Web Vitals Chrome Extension
To find your specific Core Web Vitals metric, download the Web Vitals Chrome Extension here.
- When the extension opens up on your specific web page you are testing (I recommend testing your homepage and a post page), click the Settings gear in the bottom right hand corner.
- Check all the options that are available with this extension. This will turn on a live test while you re-load your page.
- Re-load your page and take note of your current scores.
- Metrics that will load: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), First Contentful Paint, and Time to First Byte.
- This is a very fast and easy to monitor before and after you fix an item on your site to see if metrics improve.



4. Use a CLS Debugger
If you are looking to get better information about a possible CLS issue, I recommend a CLS Debugger.
- Enter your URL to this CLS Debugger here.
- Wait for the debugger to get the data.
- You can also choose device type for this report to check out desktop devices vs. mobile.
- This report shows an awesome gif of your site’s layout shifts.
- My favorite part of this report is the list HTML elements that are causing shift.


How to check core web vitals and what to do next:
Now that you have this information for your website, you can target the items that need work and fix them! Here are some articles I have for getting started with this:
- Cumulative Layout Shift WordPress Fix – Custom Fonts
- 3 Elementor Core Web Vitals Fixes for Improved CLS & LCP
Keep checking this site for even more ways to keep improving your site. And leave a comment below with a specific question and I’ll help you out!
