Just How Important Are Core Web Vitals?

[smithy]

Trying to get my site to pass CWV is really starting to piss me off. My site loads exceptionally fast on both mobile and desktop, yet GSC tells me that on mobile LCP is over 2.5 seconds. Pagespeed Insights informs me that both FCP and LCP are failing.

At this point, CWV seems like a vanity thing. Even Google's own properties fail.

Despite very fast loading times, my theme is likely the bottleneck.

Is it worth going to the trouble and money of paying someone to change the theme and customize it to look exactly like my site currently looks? I'm definitely not looking for a redesign.

 

[Darth]

If you are ranking #2, it could be the difference between #1 or #2. It's small, but could be what counts to get you to the top.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

We improved our CWV and now 50% of our sales are from mobile. Mobile UX is really important for mobile visitors, sales, and the future. I’m typing this myself from a cell phone, laying down. This, this is human progress!

 

[Andrewkar]

CWV are very important. I was working on one aged (2016) website, back then it was second player in its niche (almost no competition). After one year and a half this website dominated the niche. It was working on WP woocommerce, around 800 products. Then they hired seo agency, but in a year time they did nothing so then they hired me. It was a mess of 404s, canonicals, redirect chains, no meta desc, poor onpage optimization etc. but despite this mess website was doing fine in serps. In the mean time G started pushing mobile friendly etc.

We did a lot of work to get rid of errors and get proper onpage and offpage. Then they hired dev to make website faster becuose we've seen that our main competitor is fighting us with better/faster website and actually he is taking over some of our #1 positions. So dev created a new shop (woocommerce again) and in result of his work website was few times deindexed from serps... Google didn't like it, and as it looks to me he don't like it till these days.

Anyway we fixed those problems as well so our website started to gain some traction again, fighting to get back "our" #1s. In the mean time a new challenger arrived to the niche. His website was like those from late 90s or early 2000. UX? Pff.... Just simple, responsive, mobile friendly, loaded with content (they even didn't bother to make paragparps, just huge blocks of text etc.) and FAST.

They became a third serious player in this niche, now occupying some of main KWs at #1 positions. Our website and website of our old competitor both took some serious losses despite the fact that our domains are much older, we have much stronger backlink profiles, "better" UX etc.

This new guy in the niche was simply faster then our bloated sites. Still he is not green on CWV mobile but is better than we were. While as SEO guy I respect UX because in most cases I have to... I don't think UX is nearly as important as speed of the website (at least in some stages of business development).

Some people say that CWV are not that important because there are websites that can't pass it but still are occupying #1s. Well in my opinion this is becuose there is no faster and smarter contender yet.

P.S I'm not with this company anymore because when dev started messing around and killing my work finally I had to go. I see them from time to time and they are still fucked.