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As of this morning, the Speed Report (Experimental) in Google Search Console has been replaced by a more robust Core Web Vitals report.

It still is broken up into a Mobile and Desktop version. However, instead of just monitoring FCP (First Contentful Paint) and FID (First Input Delay), it now seems to monitor CLS and LCP ... or at least those are the issues it's flagging for my site.

Issue type is the status of the various measures:

LCP (largest contentful paint): How long it takes the page to render the largest visible element
FID (first input delay): How long it takes the page to start responding to user actions
CLS (cumulative layout shift): How much the page UI shifts during page loading.

Speed issues are assigned separately for desktop and mobile users.

As you may recall, the experimental Speed Report was disallowing any revalidation because of an alert message saying that it would be changing soon. Well it looks like it's here!

Is anyone else seeing this yet?

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Dani AI

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Good catch — that Speed → Core Web Vitals switch has kept evolving since 2020. The big change since this thread started is that Google replaced FID with INP as the “responsiveness” metric (INP became the stable Core Web Vital in March 2024). For practical work, treat Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report as a field-data, p75-based signal (LCP / INP / CLS) and use it to find templates or URL groups that need attention. (developers.google.com)

A compact triage checklist to follow (use this before you start rewriting templates): 1) Pick a failing URL group in Search Console (mobile vs desktop). 2) Run PageSpeed Insights for that sample URL to compare field (CrUX) vs lab data and to get Lighthouse opportunities. 3) Capture a Performance trace in Chrome DevTools to identify the exact LCP element and layout shifts. 4) Add lightweight RUM (web-vitals) or use CrUX data to verify fixes in the wild. This workflow maps to Google’s official guidance. ()

Quick fix patterns by metric (start with the highest-impact templates):

  • LCP: reduce server/TTFB, preload the LCP resource, prioritize critical CSS, avoid hydrating the main hero on the client if possible, and mark the main image with high fetch priority. (web.dev)
  • CLS: reserve space for images/iframes (width+height or CSS aspect-ratio), give ads fixed slots, and use font-display strategies so text metrics don’t reflow. (web.dev)
  • INP: eliminate long main-thread tasks, defer or async non‑critical third‑party scripts, code-split heavy bundles, and consider web workers or requestIdleCallback to yield to the main thread. (web.dev)

When to click “Validate / Start tracking”: only after fixes are live. Search Console/CrUX data use a rolling 28‑day window and evaluate the 75th percentile — expect changes to take days or weeks to surface (and low‑traffic pages may never show URL‑level CrUX data). Prioritize template fixes for high‑impression pages first and re-run the triage loop. ()

For a next step, pick one flagged URL group from the report, run PSI + DevTools to find the LCP/CLS culprits, implement the template-level change, and then Start tracking. (web.dev)

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I didn't realize this yet. Thanks for the awareness.. Let me study on it.

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