Business owners ask me about Core Web Vitals scores far more than they ask about indexation. That's usually backwards.

Core Web Vitals matter, but they're one ranking signal among many, and for most small-to-midsize sites, a mediocre-but-passing score rarely explains a visibility problem on its own. Indexation issues do. Pages that exist, have decent content, and simply aren't in Google's index at all because of a crawl block, a canonical pointing elsewhere, or a sitemap that was never updated will never rank, regardless of how fast they load.

I check indexation status before I check performance scores, every time. A perfectly fast page that isn't indexed generates zero organic traffic. A page that loads in 3.5 seconds but is fully indexed and well-optimized will still generate traffic.

Fix visibility first. Fix speed second. Not because speed doesn't matter; a page has to exist in the index before anything else about it matters at all.

If your dev team's been optimizing Core Web Vitals scores for months with no ranking movement, it might be worth checking indexation status first.