Core Web Vitals influence rankings, but the effect is small and mostly acts as a tiebreaker between pages of similar relevance. Teams that chase a perfect score expecting a ranking jump are almost always disappointed, and they usually spent the effort on the wrong templates.
The stronger argument is commercial. Slow, unstable pages lose conversions at a rate that dwarfs any plausible ranking benefit. That reframes the work entirely: you optimize the pages where money changes hands, not the pages with the worst scores.
Field data beats lab data for this. A synthetic test on a fast connection tells you what is theoretically possible; the Chrome UX report tells you what your actual customers experienced on their actual devices, which is frequently much worse and concentrated in specific segments.
Nobody abandoned a checkout because of a layout shift score. They abandoned it because the page felt broken.
The recurring wins are unremarkable. Correctly sized and lazily loaded images, deferred third-party scripts, reserved space for anything that loads late, and fonts that do not block rendering. Tag managers loading half a dozen marketing scripts are the single most common cause of a slow commercial page.
Set the target where it matters. Passing on your checkout and primary landing pages is worth far more than a uniform green across a blog archive nobody converts on.
