Why Core Web Vitals are crucial for optimizing digital experience

When users land on your website, the digital experience is everything. A slow-loading page, unexpected layout shifts, or unresponsive interactions can frustrate potential customers—causing higher bounce rates, abandoned carts, and low search engine rankings. To combat these issues, Google introduced Core Web Vitals (CWVs): a set of metrics designed to measure and improve the user experience of websites.

Whether you’re a developer, product owner, or IT operations leader, understanding Core Web Vitals is no longer optional—it’s an essential part of delivering flawless and immersive digital experiences. But despite their importance, understanding and mastering these metrics can be just one more set of signals your team has to manage. To unpack—and demystify—Core Web Vitals, we’ll explore what they are, why they matter, and how you can seamlessly integrate them into your operations for enhanced insights and optimization using Dynatrace.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are three specific metrics that Google uses to measure the health and quality of a web page’s user experience (UX):

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). LCP measures loading performance. It records how long it takes for the largest visible element on a page—like an image or a block of text—to load. A “good” LCP score is under 2.5 seconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). CLS quantifies visual stability by measuring how often elements on a page unexpectedly shift while it’s loading—e.g., an image loading late and pushing text out of position. A “good” CLS score is 0.1 or less.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP). Replacing First Input Delay (FID) in 2024, INP measures the overall responsiveness of a webpage, capturing how quickly it reacts to user interactions like clicks or keystrokes. A “good” INP score is under 200 milliseconds.

These metrics provide a foundation for website optimization aimed at creating faster, more stable, and more interactive web experiences.

Why are Core Web Vitals important?

Core Web Vitals aren’t just technical jargon—they directly influence a website’s user experience, business outcomes, and search engine rankings.

• Enhanced user experience. Page load speed is a crucial factor in how users experience a site, with over 50% of users saying they’ll abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Core Web Vitals address this by ensuring pages are faster, more stable, and easier to use, contributing to lower bounce rates and better engagement.
• Improved SEO. Since 2021, Google has incorporated Core Web Vitals into its ranking algorithm, rewarding websites that meet these performance benchmarks. A high CWV score improves a website’s position in search results, which can boost organic visibility.
• Business impact. Poor site performance can significantly impact revenue. For example, an improvement of just 0.1 seconds in site speed has been shown to increase conversion rates by up to 8%. Core Web Vitals serve as actionable metrics to help businesses achieve these performance gains.

Why Core Web Vitals should be part of your observability strategy

Core Web Vitals help measure and monitor user experience and front-end performance. They are important metrics, but only one part of the picture on their own. When CWV are integrated into observability—which provides deep insights into the performance, health, and user experience of applications, infrastructure, and the business itself—organizations can understand why their Core Web Vitals measure as they do and how to improve them. Core Web Vitals help organizations improve:

• End-to-end observability. Monitoring Core Web Vitals via an observability platform offers visibility into user experiences across devices, browsers, and locations. Incorporating these metrics into your observability stack ensures no blind spots in performance data from front end to back end.
• Proactive optimization. Instead of reacting to complaints, monitoring CWVs helps teams identify and address issues proactively. For example, if LCP deteriorates due to slow server response, teams can take corrective action before it impacts users.
• Bridging technical and business metrics. Integrating Core Web Vitals into observability dashboards connects technical metrics to business outcomes, such as revenue or customer retention, making them easier to communicate to stakeholders.

Monitoring Core Web Vitals with Dynatrace today

Dynatrace goes beneath the Google Search Console by offering unparalleled insights into Core Web Vitals across both the front and back ends of applications to help you understand the drivers of CWV metrics. Here’s how it stands out:

• Full metrics integration. With zero setup required, Dynatrace incorporates LCP, CLS, and INP into its Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Monitoring tools, delivering real-time and actionable insights.
• Anomaly detection. The Dynatrace Davis AI engine identifies the patterns or behavior that deviate from the norm impacting CWVs—whether it’s a slow CDN, inefficient JavaScript, or back-end latency—so teams can resolve them efficiently.
• Custom alerts and dashboards. Teams can define CWVs as key performance indicators (KPIs) and configure automated alerts, ensuring they’re notified of potential performance regressions instantly.

Enhancing support for INP

As mentioned above, Google replaced FID with INP recently. While FID was used to measure the responsiveness of the initial interaction on a page, INP observes all interactions on a page and reports the worst value.

In Dynatrace, customers can dashboard the built-in INP metric across various dimensions, such as front-end applications, browsers, and locations. In addition, a user can assess INP values via the front-end application overview screen, as well as page analysis screens, and filter for pages with the worst INP values to initiate improvements.

Maximizing the value of Core Web Vitals with Dynatrace

Optimizing Core Web Vitals isn’t a one-and-done effort; it’s an ongoing process for maintaining a high-quality user experience. Dynatrace will continue to strengthen support for Core Web Vitals to help teams maximize their value and deliver exceptional digital experiences.

With the latest Dynatrace advancements, the platform will provide more granularity of data captured with OneAgent as well as the analytics power of Grail. These capabilities will enable customers to go even deeper in monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing Google’s Core Web Vitals. This functionality is currently available on a trial basis in the preview program. Here’s a look at what the preview includes.

Seamless integration

Core Web Vitals are integrated into the new Dynatrace DEM apps, allowing users to understand the health across multiple KPIs at a glance and across monitored front-end applications. From the health overview, users can drill down into details about pages and views within their front-end applications to discover and optimize vitals across various dimensions.

Deeper analysis

With the power of DQL and ready-made Dashboards and Notebooks, users can drill deeper into the root cause of an issue related to web vitals. The following examples illustrate such an analysis with a ready-made Notebook for Core Web Vital analysis.

LCP analysis

For LCP, users can not only discover the pages with the slowest LCP but also identify the exact element that triggered the worst LCP values, simplifying the process for a developer or performance engineer to optimize page performance and user experience.

INP analysis

The ready-made Notebook also enables INP analysis. In this case, Dynatrace automatically captures the interaction that led to bad INP values and makes it easy to query across the monitored landscape with DQL. Developers and performance engineers can swiftly discover interactions that lack latency and require optimizations to reach better levels of user experience. With the context of the interaction type, tag name, and latency duration, users have all the context they need to make the right choices.

Take your digital experience to the next level

Core Web Vitals are no longer “nice-to-haves.” They’re essential metrics that define the digital experience of every user who visits your site. By understanding their importance and leveraging tools like Dynatrace, organizations can deliver faster, more stable, and more responsive websites—building trust and loyalty with their users.

Are you ready to take control of your Core Web Vitals? Start optimizing today with Dynatrace and experience the impact on your digital performance firsthand.

If you haven’t explored the platform yet, sign up for the Dynatrace playground.

Already a customer and interested in testing the new features? Learn more about the preview program.

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