How Experience Manager Assets can help you optimize your website’s content: The core web vitals guide

In today's highly competitive and user-centric digital business landscape, user experience holds immense importance. A poorly optimized, buggy, or slow website can significantly impact conversion rates and search engine rankings. Therefore, achieving long-term success for any website requires optimizing the quality of the user experience. Whether you're a business owner, marketer, or developer, Web Vitals offers valuable analysis to quantify and measure your site's performance. By leveraging Web Vitals, you gain the ability to evaluate user experience and identify areas that require improvement effectively. This, in turn, leads to enhanced overall performance and visitor satisfaction.

In this resource, we’ve discussed everything you need to know about Web Vitals and how Adobe Experience Manager Assets can help you deliver a superior user experience.

What are core Web Vitals?

Web vitals are standardized metrics that quantify the user experience of a website based on factors that Google considers important. Introduced in 2020, Google's Core Web Vitals consist of three specific measurements related to page quality, page speed, and user interaction: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These metrics focus on three aspects of web performance: loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. 

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a critical metric that assesses the performance of a web page in terms of loading speed. It represents how quickly the main content of a web page becomes visible after it starts loading. LCP measures the duration it takes for the web page to display its largest piece of content, which could be a video, a high-resolution image, or a block of text.

• LCP below 2.5 seconds: Rated as "Good", meaning the content loads quickly and ensures a smooth user experience.

• LCP between 2.5 and 4 seconds: Rated as "Needs Improvement", suggesting there is scope to optimize loading speed.

• LCP above 4 seconds: Rated as "Bad", indicating a significant delay in content visibility, which may cause user frustration and higher bounce rates.

2. Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a performance metric that evaluates a page’s responsiveness by measuring the time from a user interaction, such as a tap, click, or key press, until the next frame is visually rendered. INP considers all interactions on the page and reports a single value that reflects the slowest or most noticeable delay, offering a more holistic view of interactivity than its predecessor.

Earlier, Google used First Input Delay (FID) as the standard metric for measuring interactivity. FID only tracked the delay of the first user interaction and did not account for subsequent delays or visual feedback. To address this limitation, Google replaced FID with INP as a Core Web Vitals in March 2024, making INP the new standard for capturing the real-world responsiveness of a webpage throughout its lifecycle.

• INP score ≤ 200 milliseconds: Rated as "Good", indicating the site is highly responsive.

• INP score between 200 and 500 milliseconds: Rated as "Needs Improvement", suggesting the site could be more responsive.

• INP score > 500 milliseconds: Rated as "Poor", meaning there is noticeable input delay, which can lead to a frustrating user experience.

By focusing on INP instead of FID, developers now have a clearer, more accurate way to measure and enhance real-world interactivity, leading to better engagement, lower bounce rates, and a smoother user experience.

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the visual stability of a web page during loading. It quantifies how much visible content unexpectedly shifts on the screen while the page is loading. These shifts can happen when images, fonts, ads, or dynamic content load late and push other elements out of place. A poor CLS web vital score indicates that the page layout is unstable, leading to a disruptive experience for users.

• CLS score ≤ 0.1: Rated as "Good", meaning the page content loads stably without unexpected layout shifts.

• CLS score > 0.1: Indicates poor visual stability, which can cause: Accidental clicks, difficulty reading or interacting with content, a frustrating and poor overall user experience.

Additional Web Vitals

In addition to the core web vitals we discussed earlier, there are other supporting web vitals that offer valuable context when diagnosing and optimizing site performance. These metrics are especially helpful during lab testing and performance audits, even though they are not a part of the core set. Let's take a closer look at some of these web vitals in 2025:

1. Time to First Byte (TTFB): Time to First Byte measures the responsiveness of the web server. It calculates the duration from the moment a user makes an HTTP request to the time when the first byte of the page is received by the client's browser. It reflects server and network latency and is a key indicator of backend performance. A good TTFB speed is typically less than 200 milliseconds, indicating a fast and efficient server response.

2. First Contentful Paint (FCP): First Contentful Paint measures the time from when the page starts loading to when any content appears on the screen. It provides the first visual feedback to the user that the page is loading. A good FCP score is typically 1.8 seconds or less, ensuring that users perceive the website as fast and engaging.

3. Total Blocking Time (TBT): TBT measures the total amount of time between First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to Interactive (now deprecated) during which the main thread was blocked by long tasks (lasting over 50 milliseconds). Although TBT is a lab-only metric, it serves as a strong proxy for diagnosing potential interactivity issues and helps developers optimize for a better Interaction to Next Paint (INP) score. A good TBT is generally under 300 milliseconds.

These additional web vitals, when considered alongside the core web vitals, provide a comprehensive understanding of the user experience on your website. By measuring and optimizing these metrics, you can identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to create a website that is fast, responsive, and visually stable.

How can Adobe Experience Manager Assets help?

Adobe Experience Manager Assets can help optimize your website's content in alignment with web vitals by focusing on key areas that impact performance and user experience. Here's how it can contribute:

1. Content Delivery Optimization: Experience Manager Assets allows you to efficiently manage and deliver optimized digital assets to your website. With its dynamic media capabilities, it can automatically resize, compress, and format images and videos based on the user’s device, screen resolution, and network conditions. This optimization reduces the file size and improves loading times, directly influencing metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

2. Content Caching and CDNs: Experience Manager Assets integrates with content delivery networks (CDNs) to distribute your assets globally, reducing the latency and improving the Time to First Byte (TTFB). By leveraging smart caching, static assets load more quickly on repeat visits, enhancing page speed and improving user experience.

3. Adaptive and Responsive Design: Experience Manager Assets enables you to create and manage responsive web experiences that adapt to different devices and screen sizes. By utilizing responsive design practices, you can ensure that your content is displayed appropriately across various devices, positively impacting metrics like LCP and CLS.

4. Optimized Interactivity and Script Execution: Using lazy load, prioritizing assets, and minimizing payloads, AEM Assets makes sure the main thread is not strained during the execution of page loading. This means less time for user inputs to be processed and better INP, which, in 2024, replaced First Input Delay (FID) as the Core Web Vitals for interactivity.

5. Performance Testing and Monitoring: Experience Manager Assets supports performance testing and monitoring through integration with both real-world and lab-based tools. These capabilities allow you to see the impact of asset delivery on key Web Vitals like LCP, INP, and CLS. Analyzing the performance data across different environments and varying user conditions will help you identify bottlenecks, check to see if optimizations work, and improve your asset delivery strategies continually for better results.

6. Content Personalization: Experience Manager Assets allows for personalized content delivery based on user behavior and segmentation. With efficient targeting and optimized asset rendering, personalization becomes seamless without compromising performance, supporting faster interactivity and stable visual layouts.

By leveraging the features and capabilities of Adobe Experience Manager Assets, you can optimize your website's content in line with web vitals. This ultimately leads to improved performance, better user experience, and increased business outcomes.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website’s content with Web Vitals is important. A fast, visually stable, and responsive website enhances user experience while at the same time improving search visibility, engagement, and conversions. Adobe Experience Manager Assets allows businesses to reach these performance standards with its dynamic media delivery, responsive design, global distribution of assets, and performance monitoring.

At Ranosys, we combine our deep expertise in Adobe Experience Cloud with 16+ years of digital innovation to assist enterprises in delivering high-performing web experiences. As a multi-award-winning Adobe Solution Partner, we execute Adobe Commerce, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Analytics, Target, Marketo Engage, and more. We have a very strong global presence across the USA, South Asia, India, and the Middle East. We partner with leading brands in turning ideas into measurable business results through smart, scalable, and user-first digital solutions.

Visit: https://www.ranosys.com/global/contact-us/

Email: sales@ranosys.com

Read the complete resource here: How Experience Manager Assets can help you optimize your website’s content: The core web vitals guide