Last issue was the monthly maintenance hour. This one is about the thing everyone knows they should check and nobody enjoys checking, because the industry insists on explaining it in initials.

Core Web Vitals are a real Google ranking signal and a real predictor of whether people stay on your page. They are also explained, almost everywhere, in language that no normal person uses. So here they are in English.

The three metrics, translated

LCP — how long until the main thing shows up. Usually your hero image or headline. This is the one visitors experience as "is this site loading or not". Good is under 2.5 seconds.
INP — how quickly the page reacts when you tap something. If a menu takes half a second to open after a tap, this is the number that's bad, and it's the one people feel most viscerally on a phone. Good is under 200 milliseconds.
CLS — how much the page jumps around while it loads. The reason you tap the wrong button because an ad or a banner pushed the layout down at the last moment. Good is under 0.1.

That's the whole vocabulary. Appears fast, reacts fast, doesn't move.

One thing worth knowing that catches people out: lab tests and field data aren't the same. Running a speed test from a fast connection tells you what's possible. Google ranks on what real Chrome visitors actually experienced — on their phones, on their networks, with your cookie banner and chat widget loading. When those two disagree, the field data is the one that counts.

This week's fix: check the pages you actually care about

Not your homepage. Everyone tests the homepage and it's usually the best-optimised page you own. Test the pages where money happens — the service page, the pricing page, the contact page, the top blog post that brings in traffic. Those are the ones running the oldest embeds and the heaviest images.

To make that quick, I built a free Chrome extension: Core Web Vitals Snapshot. One click on whatever page you're on, and it tells you whether the page is fast enough for Google — in sentences, not scores.

Free forever, no account, no signup.
Nothing leaves your browser.
Plain-English verdicts rather than a number you then have to go and interpret.
Works on any page you're already looking at — including your competitors', which is a more interesting hour than it sounds.

There's a "what it means" page alongside it if you want the longer explanation of any metric, and a privacy page explaining exactly what the extension does and doesn't touch.

What to do with a bad result

Don't install a caching plugin and hope. Nine times out of ten on WordPress, a bad LCP is one of three things: an enormous hero image that was never resized, a slow server response before anything renders at all, or a font that blocks text from painting. All three are specific, findable and fixable — and worth checking before you buy anything.

And if you want the ongoing version rather than a spot check, the point Issue 9 made still holds: a spot check answers "how is this page right now", while daily monitoring answers "what changed last Tuesday". Either way, check the number before you pay for a plugin that promises to fix it.

This issue lives in the archive, organised by topic. And the plugins page shows the repeatable workflows alongside the service work.

How we can work together

Reply with a screenshot of your worst result and I'll tell you which fix would move it most.