Core Web Vitals by Industry: Australian Benchmarks (2026)

Most content about Core Web Vitals focuses on the metric definitions without showing what the numbers actually mean for real businesses. This report does both: explains each metric, shows real data from 18 Australian sites across 6 industries, and quantifies the business impact based on peer-reviewed research.

What Core Web Vitals are

Core Web Vitals are a set of three metrics that Google uses to measure user experience on websites. Google introduced them in 2020 and has evolved them since. As of 2024, the three metrics are:

Source: Google Core Web Vitals documentation

Each metric captures a different aspect of user experience.

LCP measures when the largest visible element (usually a hero image or headline) appears on screen. This is the moment the user feels the page has loaded. Common causes of poor LCP: large unoptimised images, render-blocking CSS or JavaScript, slow server response, and poorly optimised fonts.

INP replaced First Input Delay (FID) as a Core Web Vital in March 2024. INP measures how quickly the page responds to user interactions like clicks, taps, and key presses. Unlike FID which only measured the first interaction, INP measures the worst interaction during a session. Poor INP is usually caused by heavy JavaScript blocking the browser main thread.

CLS measures how much visible content moves around during page load. If an image loads late and pushes text down, or a cookie banner appears and shifts the layout, that is layout shift. It is especially frustrating on mobile where users tap the wrong element because content moved. Common causes: images without dimensions, dynamically injected content, and web fonts that swap late.

Are Core Web Vitals a ranking factor?

Yes, but with important context.

Google has confirmed Core Web Vitals affect search rankings as part of the broader page experience signal. However, CWV functions primarily as a tiebreaker between pages of similar content quality. Content relevance, E-E-A-T, and authoritativeness remain the dominant ranking signals.

In practice: if your content is excellent and your CWV is bad, you can still rank. If your content is average and your CWV is bad, you have two problems instead of one. As DebugBear's analysis notes, the performance impact on rankings is real but modest.

The bigger impact of Core Web Vitals is not on rankings. It is on conversion rates. We will come back to this.

Global CWV benchmarks

The most comprehensive public data on CWV performance comes from two sources: Google's Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), which captures real-user performance from Chrome, and the HTTP Archive Web Almanac, which analyses millions of sites annually.

Global CWV pass rates (mobile)

Source: HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2024 Performance Chapter

The switch from FID to INP in 2024 lowered pass rates by 5 percentage points globally. INP is a stricter measure of responsiveness than FID, because it captures the worst interaction during a session rather than only the first.

Desktop performance is significantly better than mobile. In 2024, approximately 54% of websites pass CWV on desktop compared to 43% on mobile. The gap reflects that mobile devices have slower processors, less memory, and more variable network conditions.

CWV by CMS (mobile, June 2025)

Core Web Vitals pass rates vary dramatically by the content management system or platform. The CrUX Technology Report tracks this:

Sources: Search Engine Journal CMS rankings, HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2024 CMS Chapter

WordPress powers 42.6% of the web but sits below the global CWV pass rate. The data is consistent across multiple measurement methodologies: WordPress, particularly with page builders like Elementor and Divi, produces measurably slower sites than other major platforms.

This has implications for anyone choosing a website platform. If performance matters to your business (and it does, for reasons we will quantify below), the starting technology significantly affects how hard you have to work to achieve good Core Web Vitals.

Original data: 18 Australian sites across 6 industries

We tested 18 Australian websites using Google PageSpeed Insights in January 2026. The sample covered 6 industries with 3 sites each: dental, law, ecommerce, real estate, restaurants/hospitality, and trades.

Dental

Category average: 61. Dental sites performed reasonably, though LCP was above threshold on all three.

Law firms

Category average: 43. Law firm sites performed poorly, with two of three scoring in the "Poor" Lighthouse band. See our dedicated report on Australian law firm websites for a deeper analysis of 15 firms.

Ecommerce

Category average: 33. Ecommerce was the worst-performing category in our sample. Large product catalogues, heavy JavaScript for filtering and personalisation, and third-party tags for analytics and ads all compound.

Real estate

Category average: 42. Real estate portals struggle with heavy image content, map integrations, and listing widgets.

Restaurants and hospitality

Category average: 42. Hospitality sites tend to prioritise visual design over performance, leading to heavy pages dominated by large hero images and video backgrounds.

Trades

Category average: 69. Jim's Mowing was the outlier in the entire sample, scoring a perfect 100 with an LCP of 1.7 seconds. The other trade sites were mid-range.

Overall findings

The dominant pattern: most Australian sites across most industries fail Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds on lab testing. Only Jim's Mowing cleared 90 on Lighthouse mobile. Only 4 sites (out of 15 with CrUX data) had "Fast" real-user ratings.

The one consistent bright spot: CrUX field data was often better than Lighthouse lab data. Real users benefit from browser caching, faster networks than the simulated throttling Lighthouse uses, and the 75th percentile measurement window that smooths out extreme slow loads. A lab score of 40 can coexist with a "Fast" CrUX rating when the real-user experience is better than the worst-case lab test.

The real impact: conversion rates, not rankings

Core Web Vitals matter for search rankings, but their impact there is modest and indirect. The direct business impact is on conversion rates, and the numbers are significant.

Deloitte/Google: Milliseconds Make Millions

The Deloitte Milliseconds Make Millions study, commissioned by Google, analysed 37 brand websites across retail, travel, and lead generation, covering over 30 million user sessions. Findings:

• Retail: 0.1s improvement = 8.4% more conversions and 9.2% higher average order value
• Travel: 0.1s improvement = 10.1% more conversions and 1.9% increase in page views per visit
• Lead generation: 0.1s improvement = 8.3% more conversions

These are marginal speed improvements. Not seconds, tenths of seconds. And the effect on revenue is measurable.

Rakuten 24: +53% revenue per visitor

Rakuten 24's Japanese e-commerce site invested in Core Web Vitals optimisation and measured the results: revenue per visitor increased 53.37%, conversion rate improved 33.13%, and session length increased 27.25%.

Vodafone: +8% sales from LCP improvement

Vodafone documented that a 31% improvement in Largest Contentful Paint led to 8% more sales, 15% improvement in lead-to-visit rate, and 11% improvement in cart-to-visit rate.

The bounce rate escalation

Google's research quantified how load time affects bounce rate:

• 1 to 3 seconds: bounce probability increases 32%
• 1 to 5 seconds: bounce probability increases 90%
• 1 to 10 seconds: bounce probability increases 123%

53% of mobile visitors abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. For a typical mid-size Australian business paying for Google Ads, SEO, or any form of online marketing, a slow site is a leaky bucket. You pay to get the visitor, and then half of them leave before the page finishes rendering.

The Google Ads compound cost

Landing page experience is one of three components of Google Ads Quality Score, contributing roughly 39% of the total. A slow landing page reduces Quality Score, which directly increases CPC. Industry research estimates a Quality Score of 10 earns a 50% CPC discount versus the baseline, while a Quality Score of 1 inflates CPC by 400%.

For businesses spending meaningful money on Google Ads, a slow site costs twice: reduced conversion rates and inflated click costs. See our research report on website speed and Google Ads for the full analysis.

CMS comparison: why the platform matters

The CrUX data above showed that 43.44% of WordPress sites pass CWV while 75.22% of Shopify sites do. Why the gap?

WordPress: flexible but heavy

WordPress is infinitely customisable, which is its greatest strength and its performance weakness. A typical WordPress business site uses:

• A theme (adds 200 to 500 KB of CSS and JavaScript)
• A page builder like Elementor or Divi (adds another 300 to 800 KB)
• 15 to 30 plugins for SEO, security, caching, forms, image optimisation, backups, analytics
• A database query on every page request

Each layer adds latency. The HTTP Archive found that Elementor sites ship 3,247 DOM nodes on average compared to 892 for hand-coded WordPress, and load 347 KB of unused CSS versus 18 KB for a clean build.

This is not WordPress's fault as software. The WordPress Performance Team has contributed meaningful optimisations. The problem is that the ecosystem incentivises plugins, themes, and builders that prioritise visual features over performance.

Shopify: narrower scope, better defaults

Shopify is a purpose-built e-commerce platform. It has less flexibility than WordPress but ships with performance-optimised defaults: lazy image loading, CDN delivery, optimised Liquid templates, and automatic caching. Themes are reviewed by Shopify before listing, which keeps quality higher than the WordPress theme marketplace.

Result: 75.22% of Shopify sites pass Core Web Vitals on mobile. Not because Shopify is "faster" than WordPress in any absolute sense, but because its defaults push merchants toward better practices.

Modern frameworks: Next.js, Astro, Remix

These are what companies like Vercel, Stripe, and TikTok use for their own websites. They generate static HTML at build time and serve pages from edge networks, eliminating server-side rendering on every request.

A well-built Next.js site typically achieves 95+ Lighthouse scores out of the box. There is no database to query on request, no PHP to parse, no plugins to load. The trade-off is that content editing requires either a developer or a headless CMS setup, which adds complexity.

For businesses where performance directly drives revenue (e-commerce, lead generation, Google Ads), the investment in a modern framework pays back through lower CPA, higher conversion rates, and reduced maintenance overhead.

How to check your site

You can test your own Core Web Vitals in under a minute.

1. Google PageSpeed Insights

pagespeed.web.dev is the simplest option. Enter your URL, run the test on mobile, and Google shows both lab data (Lighthouse) and field data (CrUX) if available.

Look at two things: the overall CWV assessment (pass or fail) and the individual metric values. Focus on mobile results, not desktop. Most traffic is now mobile, and mobile is what Google evaluates for ranking and ads quality score.

2. Google Search Console Core Web Vitals Report

If you have Search Console set up, the Core Web Vitals report shows how Google sees your site across all indexed pages, not just the one you test manually. This is the most authoritative view because it is the exact data Google uses to evaluate your site for page experience ranking signals.

3. CrUX Dashboard

The Chrome User Experience Report dashboard shows real-user data for any popular site. You can compare your own site to competitors, see month-over-month trends, and identify which metrics are dragging your CWV assessment down.

4. DebugBear, SpeedCurve, or SpeedVitals

Third-party tools like DebugBear and SpeedCurve provide continuous monitoring, historical trends, and more detailed diagnostic information than the one-time PageSpeed Insights test. These are worth the subscription fee for businesses where performance directly drives revenue.

What to fix first: prioritisation

Not all CWV issues are equally important. Based on the data and typical site patterns, here is the order to address them.

1. LCP (usually the biggest lever)

LCP is the metric most strongly correlated with user-perceived load time and the one that fails most often in our testing. Across the 18 Australian sites we tested, 17 had LCP over 2.5 seconds. The most common causes:

Unoptimised hero images. The hero image is usually the LCP element on marketing sites. If it is a 2 MB uncompressed JPEG, LCP will be slow regardless of what else you do. Convert to WebP, compress to under 200 KB where possible, and use responsive image srcsets to serve different sizes based on device width.

Render-blocking resources. CSS and JavaScript that must load before the browser can render content. Move non-critical CSS to async loading. Defer non-essential JavaScript. Inline critical CSS where possible.

Slow server response (TTFB). If Time to First Byte is over 600ms, the page is slow before any content loads. Use a CDN, implement caching, or consider static site generation to eliminate server work entirely.

Font loading. Web fonts that block text rendering delay LCP. Use font-display: swap or font-display: optional to let text render with fallback fonts while the custom font loads.

2. INP (for interactive pages)

INP matters most for pages with significant user interaction: forms, filters, product configurators, dashboards. Common causes of poor INP:

Heavy JavaScript. Every script on the page must be parsed and executed, which blocks the main thread. Audit your scripts and remove anything not essential.

Long tasks. JavaScript tasks that run for more than 50ms block user interactions. Break long tasks into smaller chunks using requestIdleCallback or setTimeout.

Third-party scripts. Analytics, chat widgets, heatmaps, A/B testing, and ad trackers are all common INP killers. Consider loading them after the page is interactive, not during initial render.

3. CLS (often the easiest fix)

CLS issues usually have specific, fixable causes:

Images without dimensions. If you do not specify width and height attributes, the browser cannot reserve space, so the image pushes content down when it loads. Always specify dimensions.

Dynamically injected content. Banners, cookie notices, and ads that appear after the page loads cause layout shift. Reserve space for them or load them at the bottom of the viewport.

Web fonts that swap. When a custom font loads and replaces a fallback, the text layout can shift if the fonts have different metrics. Use size-adjust in @font-face to match the fallback font's metrics.

Methodology

All Australian sites tested using Google PageSpeed Insights via the PageSpeed Insights API on 22 January 2026. All tests used the mobile device strategy, which simulates a mid-tier mobile phone on a slow 4G connection. Each site was tested once. Single-test results have some variance.

Sites were selected to represent 6 industries (dental, law, ecommerce, real estate, restaurants, trades) with 3 sites per industry. Selection was not randomised; we picked recognisable brand names and domain-relevant sites from organic search results for common Australian commercial queries. The sample is illustrative, not statistically representative of all Australian websites.

Metrics recorded: Lighthouse performance score (0-100), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Total Blocking Time (TBT, as a proxy for INP in lab tests), and CrUX overall origin category where available.

Global CWV pass rate data comes from the HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2024 and CrUX Technology Report. CMS comparison data is from Search Engine Journal's analysis of CrUX data.

Conversion rate impact data comes from peer-reviewed and publicly documented studies: Deloitte/Google Milliseconds Make Millions, Rakuten 24 case study, and Vodafone case study, all published on Google's web.dev platform.

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Sources

• Google Core Web Vitals Documentation - Official CWV specification and ranking factor confirmation
• web.dev Vitals - Thresholds for good/needs improvement/poor ratings
• HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2024: Performance Chapter - Global CWV pass rates by year
• HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2024: CMS Chapter - WordPress and page builder performance data
• CrUX Technology Report - CMS CWV pass rates from real-user data
• Search Engine Journal: 2025 CMS CWV Rankings - Platform comparison analysis
• Google PageSpeed Insights - Tool used for testing
• CrUX Dashboard - Real-user performance data source
• Deloitte/Google: Milliseconds Make Millions - 37 brand sites, conversion impact of load time
• Rakuten 24: Core Web Vitals Investment - +53% revenue per visitor
• Vodafone: LCP Improvement Case Study - 31% LCP improvement = 8% more sales
• Google/SOASTA: Mobile Speed Benchmarks - Mobile abandonment data
• Google Ads: About Quality Score - Landing page experience as Quality Score component
• DebugBear: Are CWV a Ranking Factor? - Analysis of CWV impact on search rankings
• WordPress Performance Team - WordPress core performance initiative
• W3Techs CMS Market Share - WordPress market share data