type: service
status: active
timestamp: 2026-06-20
tags: [perf, rum, web-vitals, vercel, primary]

Vercel Speed Insights

RUM for Web Vitals — free, works on CF Pages without Vercel hosting

Vercel Speed Insights

Role

Real-User Monitoring (RUM) for Web Vitals on every family site. A small client script (@vercel/speed-insights) reports LCP, INP, CLS, FCP, and TTFB from real visitors back to Vercel’s dashboard.

Critically — Speed Insights does not require Vercel hosting. The script works on any host that can serve a <script> tag, including Cloudflare Pages, which is the family’s primary host. We pair it with Sentry’s performance traces (server-side / API timing) and Cloudflare Web Vitals (server-side, edge-measured) for the full picture.

Free tier

10,000 data points / month per project
All Web Vitals: LCP, INP (replaces FID in 2024+), CLS, FCP, TTFB
30-day retention
Per-route breakdown
Device + connection-type segmentation
No Vercel hosting required — script-based pageview reporting

Card / subscription required?

NO. Free tier sign-up is GitHub OAuth or email. No payment method requested. Stays free as long as monthly volume per project stays under 10K data points; per-site env-var toggle keeps low-traffic sites silent for headroom (same pattern as Sentry’s ENABLE_SENTRY toggle).

Why we run it on every site

Web Vitals are the only perf signal Google ranks SEO on. Lab metrics (Lighthouse CI in PRs) and edge-measured metrics (Cloudflare Web Analytics) both miss the actual user experience: real devices, real networks, real conditions. Speed Insights fills that gap.

How it integrates (Cloudflare Pages, no Vercel hosting)

// inside @chirag127/oriz-kit
import { injectSpeedInsights } from '@vercel/speed-insights';
if (import.meta.env.ENABLE_SPEED_INSIGHTS === 'true') {
  injectSpeedInsights();
}

Vercel issues a free project ID per site for the script to phone home to. No Vercel deployment needed — the dashboard receives data from any origin you configure.

Alternatives

Cloudflare Web Vitals — server-side / edge-measured, not RUM. Complementary, not a replacement.
Sentry Performance — covers traces (API + Worker timing) but the JS SDK’s Web Vitals capture is sample-based and less detailed than Speed Insights. Complementary.
DebugBear — free 100 page audits/mo, lab-only (no RUM).
SpeedCurve — paid only.
Self-rolled with web-vitals npm package + a Worker endpoint — re-implements dashboards / alerts that Vercel gives us free.

Swap cost

Low — web-vitals (the W3C standard package) is the underlying library. Swapping means replacing injectSpeedInsights() with a direct web-vitals listener that posts to a different endpoint.

Why this is our pick

Free, no card, vendor-neutral (works on Cloudflare Pages). Captures the exact metrics Google SEO measures. Drops into @chirag127/oriz-kit as one import. Pairs cleanly with Sentry (traces) and Cloudflare Web Analytics (server-side) — together = full perf picture.

Cross-refs

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