Core Web Vitals for small sites: a practical checklist

Core Web Vitals sound intimidating. For a typical small site they come down to a handful of fixable habits. Here is the checklist we run before any launch.

Do these

• Serve images in modern formats and size them to their container.
• Set explicit width and height on images to stop layout shift.
• Preload the one font and the hero image that matter, lazy-load the rest.
• Ship less JavaScript: every script is a tax on the main thread.

Stop doing these

• Loading five tracking scripts before the page is even visible.
• Embedding a heavy map or video that nobody scrolls to.
• Shipping a 4000px hero image to a phone.

To find what is actually slow, a proper SEO toolkit pays for itself the first time it flags a problem you could not see.

We bake every item on this list into our web development work, and the measuring tools come from the stack we deploy on every project.