Field data vs lab data — which one is this?
This tool shows field data: measurements collected from real Chrome users who visited the site over the last 28 days, aggregated in Google's Chrome UX Report (CrUX). This is the same dataset Google's ranking systems read, which makes it the ground truth for "does Google think my site is fast?". It is different from lab data — what you get from a Lighthouse run — where one synthetic browser loads the page on a simulated connection. Lab data is reproducible and ideal for debugging a specific regression; field data is what your actual audience experienced, including their slow phones, flaky trains and distant geographies. You need both: field data to know whether you have a problem, lab data to find and fix it.
What the numbers mean
Every metric is reported at the 75th percentile — three quarters of visits were at least this fast. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint, good ≤ 2.5 s) is how long the main content took to appear. INP (Interaction to Next Paint, good ≤ 200 ms) is how quickly the page responds when users tap and type — it replaced FID in 2024. CLS(Cumulative Layout Shift, good ≤ 0.1) measures how much the layout jumps around while loading. The tool also shows FCP and TTFB, which are diagnostic: a slow TTFB (> 800 ms) usually means server or CDN problems and drags every other metric down with it. The colored bar under each metric is the distribution of real visits across good / needs-improvement / poor.
How to fix poor vitals
Poor LCP: compress and preload the hero image, serve it in WebP/AVIF, cut server response time with caching or a CDN, and remove render-blocking scripts. Poor INP: break up long JavaScript tasks, defer third-party tags (chat widgets and analytics are the usual offenders), and avoid re-rendering huge component trees on input. Poor CLS: give images and embeds explicit width/height, reserve space for ads and banners, and never inject content above existing content after load. If the checker reports origin-level data only, your individual page lacks traffic — the whole-site aggregate still tells you where you stand.