Core Web Vitals are a set of three specific metrics defined by Google to measure the real-world user experience of a web page. They are a confirmed ranking factor and are assessed through Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights.
The three Core Web Vitals are: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures loading performance and should be under 2.5 seconds; Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures visual stability (how much elements move around during loading) and should be under 0.1; and Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which measures responsiveness and should be under 200 milliseconds.
For AEC firms, the most common Core Web Vitals failures are: high LCP due to large uncompressed hero images or project photography; high CLS due to images without defined dimensions causing layout shifts when they load; and poor INP due to heavy JavaScript frameworks or third-party scripts.
Improving Core Web Vitals on an AEC firm website typically involves: defining explicit width and height attributes on all images, preloading the largest above-the-fold image, deferring non-critical JavaScript, and moving to a modern hosting platform with edge caching.