Anyone else seeing stronger SEO impact from Core Web Vitals lately?

I’ve been running a bunch of experiments recently around technical performance and organic rankings, and honestly the correlation has been stronger than I expected.

The biggest ranking issues I’ve found lately weren’t content-related at all. They were things like:

• broken lazy loading

• oversized hero images

• render-blocking JS

• third-party scripts tanking CLS

• slow mobile LCP on weaker connections

What surprised me most was how often “good-looking” Lighthouse scores still hid real-world UX problems in field data.

Because of that, I ended up building a small internal tool that breaks down Core Web Vitals issues more like a forensic audit instead of just giving a generic performance score.

It helped surface:

• layout shifts caused by ads/widgets

• inconsistent mobile rendering

• caching issues

• font-loading problems

• TTFB spikes from APIs

• hydration bottlenecks in JS-heavy pages

A couple fixes alone noticeably improved both UX and rankings:

• reducing unused JavaScript

• optimizing image delivery

• fixing delayed font rendering

• removing unnecessary third-party embeds

One thing I’m still curious about:

How are other people approaching performance audits today?

Are you:

• running scheduled CWV monitoring?

• relying on Lighthouse/PageSpeed manually?

• using real-user monitoring (RUM)?

• correlating CWV with ranking changes directly?

• only checking performance after traffic drops?

Would love to hear other workflows or tooling setups people are using for technical SEO performance debugging.