What Core Web Vitals actually measure
Google grades every page on three things a visitor actually feels. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is how long the main content takes to appear: under 2.5 seconds is good. INP (Interaction to Next Paint) is how fast the page responds when someone taps a button. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) is whether things jump around while loading, the reason you tap a link and hit an ad instead. These are ranking inputs, but more importantly they are conversion inputs: a customer searching from a phone with a problem does not wait for a slow page, they hit back and call the next result.
The local reality: across the Brevard County businesses we audit for the Florida Local Search Index, average mobile LCP runs about 4 seconds, well past the bar, and the sites loading under 3 seconds consistently outperform. Most local businesses are slow, which means speed is one of the few advantages you can simply buy with a weekend of fixes.
