Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are three metrics Google uses to score a page's real-world user experience. They are part of the broader Page Experience signal that has been a confirmed ranking factor since 2021.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how fast the largest piece of visible content loads. Good is under 2.5 seconds; poor is over 4 seconds. For restaurants, LCP is usually the hero image — a too-large unoptimized photo of food is the most common LCP killer.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how responsive the page is to user input — clicks, taps, key presses. Good is under 200ms; poor is over 500ms. INP problems usually trace to bloated JavaScript — too many third-party tracking scripts, an over-engineered booking widget, an unoptimized chat widget.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability — how much content jumps around as the page loads. Good is under 0.1. Restaurants often fail CLS because images load without dimensions reserved, and a banner ad or social proof widget pushes content down a second after the page paints.

The fastest path to good Core Web Vitals for a restaurant site: properly sized and compressed images with explicit width/height, a single fast hosting setup, minimal third-party scripts, and a build pipeline that ships JavaScript only where it is actually needed.

A slow restaurant website costs orders. Both because Google ranks it lower and because real users on mobile bounce. A site that takes 5 seconds to show its menu loses about half its potential mobile orders. Fixing Core Web Vitals is one of the few technical SEO investments that pays back in conversion before it pays back in ranking.