What is Core Web Vitals?
Google’s field-measured experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. Roughly half of origins pass all three, so the work remains relevant.
Related terms
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
The Core Web Vital measuring when the main content element finishes rendering, ideally under 2.5 seconds. Hero images, web fonts, and slow server responses are the usual culprits.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
The Core Web Vital measuring responsiveness: the delay between a user interaction and the next visual update. Heavy main-thread JavaScript is the standard cause of poor INP.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
The Core Web Vital measuring visual stability: how much content jumps around while loading. Reserve space for images, ads, and embeds with width, height, or aspect-ratio boxes.
Technical SEO
The crawling, indexing, rendering, and performance work that lets search engines reach, understand, and serve your pages. It covers directives, architecture, speed, and structured data rather than words on the page.
Crawling
How search-engine bots discover pages by following links, sitemaps, and directives. If a URL is never crawled, it cannot be indexed no matter how good its content is.
Crawl Budget
The number of pages a search engine will crawl on a site in a given period, driven by server capacity and demand signals. Large or slow sites must spend it on indexable, valuable URLs.