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Core Web Vitals get explained to business owners in the language of the people who fix them, which is why most owners nod along and then decline to fund the work. Here is what each one costs you, in terms a finance director would accept.
Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the page looks real
This is the time until the biggest thing on screen — usually your hero image or headline — has loaded. Below 2.5 seconds is good. Above 4 is where you start losing a measurable share of visitors before they have seen anything at all.
Commercially, this is the metric that costs you the most, because the losses happen before the visitor can form an opinion of your business. You paid for the click and got nothing for it. It is also usually the cheapest to fix: oversized images and blocking scripts account for most of it.
A slow page does not annoy visitors. It removes them, silently, before they were ever counted as visitors.
Interaction to Next Paint: how long until the page responds
How quickly the page reacts when someone taps a button or opens a menu. Under 200 milliseconds feels instant. Above 500 feels broken, and people tap again, which often makes things worse.
This one matters most on forms, filters and checkouts. If your enquiry form feels unresponsive on a mid-range phone, you are losing people who had already decided to contact you. That is the most expensive kind of loss there is.
Cumulative Layout Shift: how much the page jumps around
Content moving as the page loads, so people tap the wrong thing. Below 0.1 is good. It is the least commercially damaging of the three in most cases, but the most visibly cheap-looking, and it is trivially fixable by reserving space for images and ads.
Which to fund first
One caution: these metrics are one ranking input among many, and fixing them does not by itself move you up the results page. What they reliably do is stop you losing the visitors you already earn. Treat the work as protecting revenue rather than generating it, and the business case usually makes itself.
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