Core Web Vitals are three measurements Google uses to describe how a web page feels to a real visitor: how quickly the main content appears, how quickly the page responds when someone taps, and whether things jump around while it loads. Google's own explanation is on web.dev. This is the version for someone who runs a salon rather than a development team.
The three numbers
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
How long it takes for the biggest thing on the screen to appear, which on a salon website is usually the hero photo or video. Google counts 2.5 seconds or less as good. There is more detail in Google's guide to LCP.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
How long the page takes to react after someone taps or clicks, such as opening the menu or pressing Book. Good is 200 milliseconds or less. It replaced an older measurement, First Input Delay, in 2024. See the guide to INP.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
How much the page moves around while it loads. You have seen this when you go to tap a button and an image loads above it, so you tap something else instead. Good is a score of 0.1 or less. See the guide to CLS.
For each one, Google looks at the experience of slower visits too, not only the fastest. That is why a site can feel fine on your own phone and wifi and still score poorly.
Lab data and field data
There are two kinds of result, and they are easy to confuse.
- Field data is collected from real Chrome users who visited your site over the last 28 days. It is the more meaningful number, but a small salon website often does not have enough visitors for Google to report it.
- Lab data comes from a test run on a simulated phone. It is available for any site, and it is the one to use when you are trying to find and fix a problem.
When you only have lab data, treat it as a diagnosis rather than a grade.
How to test your site for free
Google's own tool is PageSpeed Insights. Paste in your address and look at the mobile result first, because that is how most people will find you.
Our free website check runs the same Google Lighthouse test and shows the result alongside 50 other checks, such as whether visitors can find your booking link, so you can see speed in context rather than on its own.
What usually slows a salon website down
The same handful of causes come up again and again.
- An oversized hero image or background video. A photo straight from a camera or phone can be many times larger than the screen needs. We wrote a whole post on salon photos that look good and still load fast.
- Sliders and carousels that load five large images when a visitor sees one.
- Embedded widgets such as booking calendars, social media feeds and chat bubbles, each of which loads its own code.
- Too many fonts and plugins added over the years and never removed.
- Pop-ups and banners that push the page down after it has appeared, which hurts CLS.
Fixes, in the order worth trying
- Resize and compress the first large image on each page, and use a modern format such as WebP.
- Replace an embedded booking calendar with a clear button that opens your booking page.
- Remove widgets and plugins nobody would miss.
- Give images and embeds fixed dimensions, so the page does not shift when they load.
- Load video only when someone chooses to play it.
How much does this matter?
Speed is one of many signals, and a fast page with nothing useful on it will not rank because it is fast. But a slow page costs you in a more direct way: people on a phone give up and go back to the search results, where other salons are one tap away. Make the page fast enough that nobody leaves before they have seen your work, then spend your effort on what the page says.