Doing a technical audit pass across a batch of client sites recently, and the pattern that kept showing up wasn't image size or unminified JS, it was Cumulative Layout Shift. Ads, embedded fonts, and lazy-loaded images without reserved dimensions were quietly tanking CLS scores even on sites that scored fine on LCP and FID.
The fix is usually boring: explicit width/height on images, font-display: swap with a fallback that matches the real font's metrics, and reserving space for anything that loads late (ads, embeds). None of it is hard, it's just easy to miss because PageSpeed's headline score doesn't always make CLS obvious as the culprit.
Curious if other devs are running into this as much as we are, or if there's a tool/workflow you use to catch layout shift issues before they ship rather than after a client complains about rankings dropping.
We're a small SEO/dev team (Semark Global) and this has become one of our standard audit checks now.
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