What is core web vitals?

Why it matters for a contractor.

Contractor sites are photograph-heavy by nature, which makes them the category most likely to fail these, and the failure costs conversions before it costs rankings.

The ranking effect is real but modest. The conversion effect is not modest at all: a homeowner comparing three contractors on a phone at night does not wait for a hero video to decode, and the bounce happens before any ranking factor gets a chance to matter.

For this industry the cause is nearly always the same three things: uncompressed project photography, a page builder loading scripts nothing on the page uses, and embedded third-party widgets nobody chose deliberately. The fix for the first is compression, not fewer photos, because the photos are the conversion asset.

Test on a phone on cellular data rather than on office wifi on a desktop. That is the condition your buyer is actually in, and it is where a site that scores acceptably in a lab turns out to be unusable.

What to ask a vendor about it.

• Open my site on a phone on cellular and count the seconds.
• Are project photos compressed, or uploaded straight from a camera?
• What third-party scripts are loading, and did we choose all of them?
• What does PageSpeed Insights say for mobile, not desktop?