What are the Core Web Vitals thresholds?
Short answer
A page passes when the main content appears within 2.5 seconds, the page reacts to a tap within 0.2 seconds, and it barely shifts about while loading. In Google's own terms those are LCP, INP and CLS, each measured across roughly three quarters of your real visitors over the past 28 days.
The three metrics
| Metric | Measures | Good | Needs work | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | Loading — when the main content appears | ≤ 2.5s | 2.5–4.0s | > 4.0s |
| INP | Responsiveness — delay before the page reacts | ≤ 200ms | 200–500ms | > 500ms |
| CLS | Visual stability — how much the layout jumps | ≤ 0.1 | 0.1–0.25 | > 0.25 |
Real visitors, not a testing tool
These are measured from your actual visitors, on their own phones and connections, over the past month — and you have to be fast for roughly three quarters of them, not on average.
That is why a website can score almost perfectly in a speed-testing tool and still be marked as failing by Google. The tool tells you the page can be fast on a good connection. Google is telling you what it is actually like for the quarter of your customers on an older phone with patchy signal. Only one of those is what search engines use.
The cheapest wins
Most failures come down to four things: pictures that do not reserve their space, so everything jumps down when they load; code that has to finish before anything appears; fonts arriving late and reshuffling the text; and third-party extras — chat widgets, tracking, social buttons — holding everything up. Fixing those four covers most websites, and none of them require a redesign.
Last reviewed 5 September 2026