Learn how to attribute your performance data with debug information
to help you identify and fix real-user issues with analytics


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Google provides two categories of tools to measure and debug performance:

- **Lab tools:** Tools such as Lighthouse, where your page is loaded in a simulated environment that can mimic various conditions (for example, a slow network and a low-end mobile device).
- **Field tools:** Tools such as [Chrome User Experience
  Report](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/crux) (CrUX), which is based on aggregate, real-user data from Chrome. (Note that the field data reported by tools such as [PageSpeed
  Insights](https://pagespeed.web.dev/) and [Search
  Console](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520) is sourced from CrUX data.)

While field tools offer more accurate data---data which actually represents what
real users experience---lab tools are often better at helping you identify and fix
issues.

CrUX data is more representative of your page's real performance, but knowing
your CrUX scores is unlikely to help you figure out *how* to improve your
performance.

Lighthouse, on the other hand, will identify issues and make specific
suggestions for how to improve. However, Lighthouse will only make suggestions
for performance issues it discovers at page load time. It does not detect issues
that only manifest as a result of user interaction such as scrolling or clicking
buttons on the page.

This raises an important question: **how can you capture debug information for
Core Web Vitals or other performance metrics from real users in the field?**

This post will explain in detail what APIs you can use to collect additional
debugging information for each of the current Core Web Vitals metrics and give
you ideas for how to capture this data in your existing analytics tool.

## APIs for attribution and debugging

### Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Of all the Core Web Vitals metrics, [CLS](https://web.dev/articles/cls) is perhaps the one for which
collecting debug information in the field is the most important. CLS is measured
throughout the entire lifespan of the page, so the way a user interacts with the
page---how far they scroll, what they click, and so on---can have a significant
impact on whether there are layout shifts and which elements are shifting.

Consider the following report from PageSpeed Insights:
![A PageSpeed Insights Report with different CLS values](https://web.dev/static/articles/debug-performance-in-the-field/image/psi-cls-difference.png) PageSpeed Insights shows both field and lab data where available and these may be different

The value reported for CLS from the lab (Lighthouse) compared to the CLS from
the field (CrUX data) are quite different, and this makes sense if you consider
that the page may have a lot of interactive content that
is not being used when tested in Lighthouse.

But even if you understand that user interaction affects field data, you still
need to know what elements on the page are shifting to result in a score of 0.28
at the 75th percentile. The [LayoutShiftAttribution](https://web.dev/articles/debug-layout-shifts#layoutshiftattribution)
interface makes that possible.

#### Get layout shift attribution

The [LayoutShiftAttribution](https://web.dev/articles/debug-layout-shifts#layoutshiftattribution)
interface is exposed on each `layout-shift` entry that [Layout Instability
API](https://wicg.github.io/layout-instability) emits.

For a detailed explanation of both of these interfaces, see [Debug layout
shifts](https://web.dev/articles/debug-layout-shifts#layoutshiftattribution). For the purposes of
this post, the main thing you need to know is that, as a developer, you are able
to observe every layout shift that happens on the page as well as what elements
are shifting.

Here's some example code that logs each layout shift as well as the elements
that shifted:

    new PerformanceObserver((list) => {
      for (const {value, startTime, sources} of list.getEntries()) {
        // Log the shift amount and other entry info.
        console.log('Layout shift:', {value, startTime});
        if (sources) {
          for (const {node, curRect, prevRect} of sources) {
            // Log the elements that shifted.
            console.log('  Shift source:', node, {curRect, prevRect});
          }
        }
      }
    }).observe({type: 'layout-shift', buffered: true});

It's probably not practical to measure and send data to your analytics tool for
every single layout shift that occurs; however, by monitoring all shifts, you
can keep track of the worst shifts and just report information about those.

The goal isn't to identify and fix every single layout shift that occurs for
every user; the goal is to identify the shifts that affect the largest number of
users and thus contribute the most to your page's CLS at the 75th percentile.

Also, you don't need to compute the largest source element every time there's a
shift, you only need to do so when you're ready to send the CLS value to your
analytics tool.

The following code takes a list of `layout-shift` entries that have contributed
to CLS and returns the largest source element from the largest shift:

    function getCLSDebugTarget(entries) {
      const largestEntry = entries.reduce((a, b) => {
        return a && a.value > b.value ? a : b;
      });
      if (largestEntry && largestEntry.sources && largestEntry.sources.length) {
        const largestSource = largestEntry.sources.reduce((a, b) => {
          return a.node && a.previousRect.width * a.previousRect.height >
              b.previousRect.width * b.previousRect.height ? a : b;
        });
        if (largestSource) {
          return largestSource.node;
        }
      }
    }

Once you've identified the largest element contributing to the largest shift,
you can report that to your analytics tool.

The element contributing the most to CLS for a given page will likely vary from
user to user, but if you aggregate those elements across all users, you'll be
able to generate a list of shifting elements affecting the most number of users.

After you've identified and fixed the root cause of the shifts for those
elements, your analytics code will start reporting smaller shifts as the "worst"
shifts for your pages. Eventually, all reported shifts will be small enough that
your pages are well within [the "good" threshold of
0.1](https://web.dev/articles/cls#what_is_a_good_cls_score)!

Some other metadata that may be useful to capture along with the largest shift
source element is:

- The time of the largest shift
- The URL path at the time of the largest shift (for sites that dynamically update the URL, such as Single Page Applications).

### Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

To debug LCP in the field, the primary information you need is which particular
element was the largest element (the LCP candidate element) for that particular
page load.

Note that it's entirely possible---in fact, it's quite common---that the LCP
candidate element will be different from user to user, even for the exact same
page.

This can happen for several reasons:

- User devices have different screen resolutions, which results in different page layouts and thus different elements being visible within the viewport.
- Users don't always load pages scrolled to the very top. Oftentimes links will contain [fragment identifiers](https://web.dev/articles/text-fragments#fragment_identifiers) or even [text fragments](https://web.dev/articles/text-fragments#text_fragments), which means it's possible for your pages to be loaded and displayed at any scroll position on the page.
- Content may be personalized for the current user, so the LCP candidate element could vary wildly from user to user.

This means you cannot make assumptions about which element or set of elements
will be the most common LCP candidate element for a particular page. You have to
measure it based on real-user behavior.

> [!NOTE]
> **Note:** For more details on these differences, see: [Why lab and field data can be different (and what to do about it)](https://web.dev/articles/lab-and-field-data-differences)

#### Identify the LCP candidate element

To determine the LCP candidate element in JavaScript you can use the [Largest
Contentful Paint API](https://wicg.github.io/largest-contentful-paint/), the
same API you use to determine the LCP time value.

When observing `largest-contentful-paint` entries, you can determine the
current LCP candidate element by looking at the `element` property of the last entry:

    new PerformanceObserver((list) => {
      const entries = list.getEntries();
      const lastEntry = entries[entries.length - 1];

      console.log('LCP element:', lastEntry.element);
    }).observe({type: 'largest-contentful-paint', buffered: true});

> [!CAUTION]
> **Caution:** As explained in the [LCP metric documentation](https://web.dev/articles/lcp), the LCP candidate element can change through the page load, so more work is required to identify the "final" LCP candidate element. The easiest way to identify and measure the "final" LCP candidate element is to use the [web-vitals](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web-vitals/) JavaScript library, as shown in the [example](https://web.dev/articles/debug-performance-in-the-field#usage-with-web-vitals-js).

Once you know the LCP candidate element, you can send it to your analytics tool
along with the metric value. As with CLS, this will help you identify which
elements are most important to optimize first.

In addition to the LCP candidate element, it may also be useful to measure the
[LCP sub-part times](https://web.dev/articles/optimize-lcp#optimal_sub-part_times), which can be useful
in determining what specific optimization steps are relevant for your site.

### Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

> [!TIP]
> **Tip:** See the dedicated [Find slow interactions in the field](https://web.dev/articles/find-slow-interactions-in-the-field) article for more information about debugging INP with field data.

The most important bits of information to capture in the field for INP are:

1. What element was interacted with
2. Why type of interaction it was
3. When that interaction took place

A major cause of slow interactions is a blocked main thread, which can
be common while JavaScript is loading. Knowing whether most slow interactions
occur during page load is helpful in determining what needs to be done to fix
the problem.

The INP metric considers the full latency of an
interaction---including the time it takes to run any registered event listeners as
well as the time it takes to paint the next frame after all events listeners
have run. This means that for INP it's really useful to know which target
elements tend to result in slow interactions, and what types of interactions
those are.

The following code logs the target element and time of the INP entry.

    function logINPDebugInfo(inpEntry) {
      console.log('INP target element:', inpEntry.target);
      console.log('INP interaction type:', inpEntry.name);
      console.log('INP time:', inpEntry.startTime);
    }

Note that this code doesn't show how to determine which `event` entry is the INP
entry, as that logic is more involved. However, the following section explains
how to get this information using the
[web-vitals](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web-vitals) JavaScript library.

## Usage with the web-vitals JavaScript library

The previous sections offer some general suggestions and code examples to capture
debug info to include in the data you send to your analytics tool.

Since version 3, the [web-vitals](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web-vitals/)
JavaScript library includes an [attribution
build](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web-vitals#attribution-build) that
surfaces all of this information, and a few [additional
signals](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web-vitals#attribution) as well.

The following code example shows how you could set an additional [event
parameter](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11396839) (or [custom
dimension](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2709828)) containing a
debug string useful for helping to identify the root cause of performance
issues.

    import {onCLS, onINP, onLCP} from 'web-vitals/attribution';

    function sendToGoogleAnalytics({name, value, id, attribution}) {
      const eventParams = {
        metric_value: value,
        metric_id: id,
      }

      switch (name) {
        case 'CLS':
          eventParams.debug_target = attribution.largestShiftTarget;
          break;
        case 'LCP':
          eventParams.debug_target = attribution.element;
          break;
        case 'INP':
          eventParams.debug_target = attribution.interactionTarget;
          break;
      }

      // Assumes the global `gtag()` function exists, see:
      // https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ga4
      gtag('event', name, eventParams);
    }

    onCLS(sendToGoogleAnalytics);
    onLCP(sendToGoogleAnalytics);
    onINP(sendToGoogleAnalytics);

This code is specific to Google Analytics, but the general idea should translate
to other analytics tools as well.

This code also just shows how to report on a single debug signal, but it is
useful to be able to collect and report on multiple different signals per
metric.

For example, to debug INP you might want to collect the element being
interacted with, the interaction type, the time, the loadState, the interaction
phases and more (such as [Long Animation Frame data](https://web.dev/articles/find-slow-interactions-in-the-field#the_long_animation_frame_api_loaf)).

The `web-vitals` attribution build exposes additional attribution information,
as shown in the following example for INP:

    import {onCLS, onINP, onLCP} from 'web-vitals/attribution';

    function sendToGoogleAnalytics({name, value, id, attribution}) {
      const eventParams = {
        metric_value: value,
        metric_id: id,
      }

      switch (name) {
        case 'INP':
          eventParams.debug_target = attribution.interactionTarget;
          eventParams.debug_type = attribution.interactionType;
          eventParams.debug_time = attribution.interactionTime;
          eventParams.debug_load_state = attribution.loadState;
          eventParams.debug_interaction_delay = Math.round(attribution.inputDelay);
          eventParams.debug_processing_duration = Math.round(attribution.processingDuration);
          eventParams.debug_presentation_delay =  Math.round(attribution.presentationDelay);
          break;

        // Additional metric logic...
      }

      // Assumes the global `gtag()` function exists, see:
      // https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ga4
      gtag('event', name, eventParams);
    }

    onCLS(sendToGoogleAnalytics);
    onLCP(sendToGoogleAnalytics);
    onINP(sendToGoogleAnalytics);

Refer to the [web-vitals attribution
documentation](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web-vitals#attribution) for the
complete list of debug signals exposed.

## Report and visualize the data

Once you've started collecting debug information along with the metric values,
the next step is aggregating the data across all your users to start looking for
patterns and trends.

As mentioned previously, you don't necessarily need to address every single issue
your users are encountering, you want to address---especially at first---the issues
that are affecting the largest number of users, which should also be the issues
that have the largest negative impact on your Core Web Vitals scores.

For GA4 see the dedicated article on [how to query and visualize the data using
BigQuery](https://web.dev/articles/vitals-ga4).

## Summary

Hopefully this post has helped outline the specific ways you can use the
existing performance APIs and the `web-vitals` library to get debug information
to help diagnose performance based on real users visits in the field. While this
guide is focused on the Core Web Vitals, the concepts also apply to debugging
any performance metric that's measurable in JavaScript.

If you're an analytics vendor and you're looking to improve your products and
provide more debugging information to your users, consider some of the
techniques described here but don't limit yourself to *just* the ideas presented
here. This post is intended to be generally applicable to all analytics tools;
however, individual analytics tools likely can (and should) capture and report
even more debug information.

Lastly, if you feel there are gaps in your ability to debug these metrics due to
missing features or information in the APIs themselves send your feedback to
[web-vitals-feedback@googlegroups.com](mailto:web-vitals-feedback@googlegroups.com).