Vercel Speed Insights
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-vitalsnpm 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.