Core Web Vitals
Vitals show up in three separate jobs — auditing a site, configuring measurement so the field data is trustworthy, and building so the numbers were never bad. The last one is by far the cheapest.
How I use it
Site audits — field data over lab data
Lighthouse reports what a fast machine on a fast connection experienced; CrUX reports what your visitors actually did. They regularly disagree, and only one of them is the ranking input.
Configuring analytics for clients
Vitals go in alongside conversion tracking, because a page that got slower and a page that stopped converting are frequently the same event and nobody connects them otherwise.
Layout stability
Explicit media dimensions and fonts loaded so they do not reflow the page on arrival. CLS is almost always a handful of specific, fixable offenders.
Not shipping JavaScript out of habit
Static generation where the content allows it, and a lighter framework where React was never required. The fastest script is the one never sent.
What I use
- PageSpeed Insights
- CrUX
- Lighthouse
- Chrome DevTools
- GA4
Related skills
Want the detail behind any of this?
I can walk through any of it in as much depth as you want.