2025-02-26 · Browser

Measure Core Web Vitals with real user monitoring

Lab scores look fine; your 4G users are the ones telling the truth.

Introduction

Set up field collection for LCP, INP, and CLS, slice the numbers by device, and turn a slow p75 into a concrete fix list.

Field notes

A few patterns we kept seeing while puttering around Browser problems:

  • The simple version survived every refactor; the clever version didn’t.
  • Documentation written during the work aged far better than documentation written after.
  • The second time a problem shows up, it is already a pattern — name it.

A checklist you can steal

  • The failure is reproducible with one command.
  • The fix has a test that fails without it.
  • Someone other than the author has run it on their machine.

Closing

Write the short version future-you will actually read. That is the whole trick.