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10 Business Case Studies to Teach Online

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FEATURED CASE STUDIES

COVID-19 at Oxford University Hospitals. Karthik Ramanna of University of Oxford

Arlan Hamilton and Backstage Capital. Laura Huang of Harvard Business School

Showrooming at BestBuy. Chen Lin of CEIBS

The Case of the Unidentified Industries, 2018. Mihir Desai of Harvard Business School

“Dear White Boss…” Meredith Burnett of Kogod School of Business at American University

Unilever’s New Global Strategy: Competing Through Sustainability. Christopher Bartlett of Harvard Business School

TrustSphere: Building a Market for Relationship Analytics. Anna Tavis of NYU School of Professional Studies

Benevento Foods: When the Rubber Hits the Dough. David Wood of Ivey Business School

Dollar Shave Club. Karin Kollenz-Quetard of EDHEC Business School

Uber Africa: Making Cash and Alternative Payments Work in Kenya through Contextual Leadership. Caren Scheepers of University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science

Curious to understand how educators are teaching business case studies virtually (whether they’ve done so for years or only recently transitioned their teaching online in the pandemic’s wake), we asked 10 experienced case teachers to share a case that they’ve found works particularly well in an online environment. The educators also reveal whether they’ve changed their approach to teaching the case—and how—to keep students engaged in a fully virtual setting.

We previously asked educators to share their favorite cases to teach in the classroom; the list below expands on that theme to include cases that work particularly well online. These cases range in topic from COVID-19 to race in the workplace and also represent a variety of disciplines, from entrepreneurship to operations management.

1. COVID-19 at Oxford University Hospitals

Karthik Ramanna, Professor of Business and Public Policy, University of Oxford

“The case COVID-19 at Oxford University Hospitals is set in mid-March of this year, just before the lockdowns and the first wave of the pandemic was expected to hit the West. There was a lot of uncertainty and anxiety about the virus, and government advice was often contradictory. The case protagonist is the chief medical officer of one of the largest public hospitals in Europe, and she has to convene a hybrid meeting of her doctors explaining to them that the government wants elective surgeries to continue for a few more days, even as there are critical shortages of PPE. The reason is the government doesn’t want the hospital systems to back up with elective surgeries as we enter a potentially indefinite shutdown. But the surgeons are themselves nervous, and some want to defy the government order.

It’s a case about active listening, morale management, and collective decision-making in a crisis. The issues might seem, at first, very specific to medics, but all organizations—business, government, and nonprofit—are being stretched to make decisions that involve staff taking risks to keep operations going. How do you take the team along and reinforce your organizational culture through that journey? The protagonist has to communicate and work with her team in a hybrid environment (in person and online), so this case works really well for hybrid and online classrooms.

The first thing that comes up during the case discussion is the sheer number of issues on the CMO’s plate on just that one morning in mid-March. So, students need to learn how to prioritize, to triage. This is a great activity to disperse students into smaller breakout rooms to come up with a top-three priorities list. In the breakouts, they quickly see how varied their priorities are and how difficult it is in even a small group to come up with a consensus list. They start to understand what it means to have good judgment on such matters.

Next, there is the issue of communicating with the nervous surgeons. The case lends itself well to role plays online, because the protagonist has to address the surgeons in the same way. How do you placate your key employees in a remote setup during a pandemic when your own boss is requiring you to ask those employees to take more risks? Ideally, you’d want to have a difficult conversation like that in person, but we just aren’t being afforded that reality right now. Students learn to adapt their online presence for the task at hand.”

Educators interested in this case should email the Oxford Case Centre .

2. Arlan Hamilton and Backstage Capital

Laura Huang, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Excerpted from Associate Professor Huang’s Inside the Case video :

“ Arlan Hamilton and Backstage Capital is a case I wrote that explores the journey of venture capitalist and founder Arlan Hamilton, a Black woman who identifies as LGBTQ. The case talks about the norms around venture capital and how women, people of color, and people with nontraditional backgrounds really struggle to secure the necessary venture capital for their firms and for entrepreneurial success. While the protagonist once lived in her car, she was able to go on to start Backstage Capital, an investment fund that seeks to support underestimated, disadvantaged entrepreneurs.

It’s a great case to really introduce important concepts in entrepreneurship, as well as early stage financing; what it means in terms of diversity, equality, and implicit bias; and really how pioneering individuals and organizations can change the world of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial financing and make it a more inclusive space. My hope is that this case pushes students to consider what these types of industries look like, and the types of progress that can be made, while really understanding entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurship and the opportunities within.”

“This is a great case to teach online because I find there are lots of things that people are willing to debate—and there are strong opinions. Over the course of going through this case in the class discussion, we’ll see lots of polarizing comments come out. And then what I like to do is put students into dyads or pairs. I often have someone who is assisting that helps put students into these pairs, where one person has one perspective and one person has a very different perspective. Then, when we put them in breakout rooms, they have a chance to one-on-one debate. When we come back as a class, we debrief, and we talk about these perspectives and the different points and the different ways in which they were able to communicate with each other.

We use lots of online tools here, such as breakout rooms and the chat features, to really stimulate discussion, and it makes the debrief really rich.”

Additional comments from Associate Professor Huang:

“In general, the biggest change that I’ve made in teaching online (instead of in the classroom), is using the online tools as an opportunity to get frequent and quick ‘pulse checks’ on what the students are thinking at any moment.

For example, if there’s a particularly provocative topic that we’re discussing, I love to ask students to just ‘chat in one adjective that describes your current feeling right now,’ This gives me a sense for how some are feeling, for example, ‘frustrated,’ while others are feeling ‘determined,’ and so on. I never would have been able to get such a quick check on the emotions in the entire room, in such a quick fashion, when in the physical classroom. This is extremely helpful when we’re discussing contentious issues, such as the ones that we discuss in Arlan Hamilton and Backstage Capital . I also encourage students to share examples from their own work experiences in this way.”

3. TrustSphere: Building a Market for Relationship Analytics

Anna A. Tavis, Clinical Associate Professor, NYU, School of Professional Studies

“I teach this case in a synchronous online course called People and Organizational Management, which serves as an immersion and introduction to the MS in the Human Capital Analytics and Technology program at NYU’s School of Professional Studies.

The case describes a seven-year-old advanced-stage startup that introduces a cutting-edge relationship analytics technology to the market. The fact that this case is focused on measuring and interpreting patterns of digital communications is perfectly fitting with the current reality of remote working and learning that the students in this class are experiencing.

The case lends itself perfectly to online teaching. Here is how I make this case come alive for my students.

Manish Goel, the protagonist in this case, is based in London while the majority of my students are in the United States. As I’m now teaching the case online, I can (and do!) invite Manish Goel to guest lecture in class and tell his own story.

I also demo TrustSphere technology for the students just in time to enable them to understand how it works, as well as give them an opportunity to log in and try out the technology for themselves.

Once the facts are established and the initial business case is described and agreed upon, I divide the students into breakout groups and ask them to develop solutions for the case’s main dilemma. The online setting allows all teams to work in parallel on their own scenarios. I can also circulate and drop into the teams’ individual discussions.

When the groups are joined back, they showcase and defend their solutions. We keep a whiteboard running to record the key points in the presentations. In the end, we do an anonymous poll to vote for the best solutions among them all.

Finally, as a class, we prepare one agreed-upon presentation for Manish Goel, the CEO. The case ends with the class receiving the feedback from Manish on our solution in the next class.

A clear advantage of teaching this case online is that we are able to connect with the company, bring the CEO to a live class, establish parallel teams to work on the solutions, and learn from the CEO himself as to the efficacy of the solution we proposed. Additionally, the students learn the technology together in the demo presented in class and are able to connect not only to the content but also the context of the case.”

4. The Case of the Unidentified Industries, 2018

Mihir A. Desai, Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, Harvard Business School

Excerpted from Professor Desai’s Inside the Case video :

“I developed versions of this case over the last 10 years as I was seeking a tool that would allow me to introduce finance in a rigorous but accessible way to audiences who might feel that finance could be intimidating or challenging.

This case’s format of a puzzle, almost like a game, is a really fun way to let people in so they discover finance is actually really fun. Although some of the concepts might be new to them, students quickly develop some really big intuitions about finance and the process. I’ve found this case to be the ideal way to introduce a finance course, and to introduce the idea of finance to MBA students, undergrads, and even executives.”

“I have taught this case online, and it’s really fun. I mean, the key thing to remember is the case takes some time, especially if you are willing to really explore what all those different ratios and numbers do, and it can take two sessions. So, in that kind of setting, I think the key thing to remember with online teaching is that I’ve at least found it to be somewhat less efficient. I just get through less. And so, some of the places you can go down a path, yet you might want to curtail that a little bit more.

For example, I take the bank, which is one of the first companies to be identified, and in traditional classrooms I do a little digression on banks. And when you’re doing it online, it’s just too costly to do that because it can take five or 10 minutes in a way that maybe would not happen in a classroom. So, the only thing I would say that’s really different about being online is you may want to just trim your sails a little bit in terms of the amount that you try to accomplish.”

Additional comments from Professor Desai:

“One of the challenges to teaching online is keeping attention and energy high. The Case of the Unidentified Industries, 2018 is a challenging but doable puzzle, so it provides lots of intrigue and morsels of rewards along the way to sustain an online format. Finally, it culminates in a tidy resolution, which provides students with a great feeling of satisfaction. The case can be punctuated with lots of shorter opportunities for breakout rooms where smaller groups can tackle a piece of the puzzle and then reconvene to share their ideas. Ideally, you could teach it over two one-and-a-quarter-hour sessions, with over 10 breakout rooms of three minutes each spread along the way. Students can prepare in advance or do it on the fly. To me, it’s the perfect antidote to the cold medium of online teaching.”

5. “Dear White Boss…”

Meredith Burnett, Professorial Lecturer, Kogod School of Business at American University

“This Harvard Business Review article , which behaves much like a case, is about Black employees working in a majority white work environment. They feel like their work is monotonous. The job is very transactional. It’s about making numbers and motivating people to get those numbers, and if they don’t make it, they’re fired. But at the same time, their managers have created such a tense work environment that employees are reluctant to excel in the workplace, or even to contribute at the best level that they can. The case features a fictitious letter written from the perspective of a Black manager to a white boss explaining the tension and stress they feel. The letters describe how it feels to be Black employees. Written from the heart, they talk about how they feel alienated and that they are expected to be the official interpreters for other Black people in the workplace. They also feel like they’re always on the spot, being held personally culpable for every situation involving Black people in the workplace. It’s as if they are the authority on race relations just for being Black.

Even though it’s an older case, I enjoy teaching it because every year there’s something going on that makes this relevant. This semester, what I did differently online is I had students write their own letters and post them to the discussion forum. My students wrote over 100 letters, whether to a fictitious boss or a real one, and I found it useful to see how my 20- to 21-year-old students are experiencing race right now, especially when race is salient for them. It also prepares them for some of the issues that they may face as new entrants into the workforce.

It’s interesting because the majority of my students are not Black, so most of these letters were written by white students—giving them a voice on a subject that they may not otherwise be asked about and an opportunity to speak up about how management should be handling issues around race.

Because the letters are posted to the discussion board, students get to see every other student’s letter and comment. They give feedback to each other on the content of their letters and see how other students who are not like themselves feel about what the most important issues are around race in their organization.

I then take the letters and put them in a word cloud, which allows me to look visually at what students believe are the most important issues in a workplace around diversity, equity, and inclusion. In an online setting, it’s hard to create engagement, but this allows students to see what their classmates are really thinking and feeling. We would never have been able to do that during in-person class time—in 75 minutes, you might hear from a few students with big voices. Doing this online, students have been able to participate extensively.”

6. Unilever’s New Global Strategy: Competing Through Sustainability

Christopher A. Bartlett, Thomas D. Casserly, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, Harvard Business School

Excerpted from Professor Bartlett’s Inside the Case video :

“To be honest, I never intended to write this case. I think this case found me. I’d already retired after writing 100 or more teaching notes and cases and other pedagogic material. I was reading a Harvard Business Review article titled ‘Captain Planet,’ and it was an interview with Paul Polman, who had recently been appointed CEO of Unilever. Paul made some passionate statements, such as, ‘I want to double sales at Unilever by 2020,’ and, ‘I want to halve our carbon footprint at the same time.’ Then to my great amusement, he said, ‘And by the way, I don’t want any hedge funds investing.’ He wanted long-term investors who were sympathetic to and supportive of what he was trying to do. So, I thought, this is an interesting company and an interesting guy. I learned a huge amount and had a great deal of fun writing this case, and I hope you learn as much and have as much fun teaching it.”

“When it comes to the challenge of keeping Zoom-fatigued students engaged in online learning, this case gives you a lot of opportunities to keep them engaged and involved. There’s 13 minutes of video that can be introduced at four stages through the lesson. There’s also, up early, opportunities for breakouts around the role playing—the four role-playing roles can assemble in breakout groups and then come back into the main discussion.

At the end of the class, there is a decision—students choose which of three options they should decide on. And again, this is a perfect opportunity to bring in online polling. So, it will enrich and give variety to the teaching plan that’s outlined in the teaching note.”

Additional comments from Professor Bartlett on how his approach changed in teaching the case online:

“One of the main differences in online case teaching is recognizing the reality of Zoom fatigue. One effective way to respond is to bring more pedagogic variety into the class to reengage attention and drive discussion. In-class video supplements have long provided such a powerful way to enrich the classroom experience, and now online tools such as breakout rooms and online polling offer additional ways to keep students engaged and to energize discussion.”

7. Showrooming at BestBuy

Chen Lin, Assistant Professor of Marketing, CEIBS

“My favorite case to teach online is Showrooming at BestBuy . Of course, this is a classic case with a well-defined question, strong theoretical support, and a good execution outcome that is great to teach whether you’re online, offline, or hybrid. We have to be sympathetic that online students this year have lots to deal with in their lives—so picking a case that’s simple, prevalent, and easy enough for them to understand the question (even if they don’t have time to fully read and digest the case) is an important first step to ensuring a successful discussion.

I did need to make some adjustments to teach this case online. Previously, in in-person settings, I would come up to students and randomly pick them to role play—either as the BestBuy manager, the price-sensitive customer, the supplier, or the Amazon manager. Students would often jump in to help their peers (‘Oh, I would also do X’ or ‘No, that’s not going to work’). In an online setting, because the communication process is more sequential than simultaneous, we lose these important dynamics if we don’t play up these subtle classroom rapports. So, it’s important to give students a few extra minutes for breakout discussion to put together their thoughts in a cohesive structure.

To teach this case online, I use Zoom’s poll function and breakout rooms. I don’t just use pre-set polls; I also create live polls on the spot. For example, ‘Student A’s point is interesting. Do you agree with their proposal that we should reduce the size of the showroom?’ The flow looks more natural using polls this way, and students get a chance to further develop their arguments. Good-paced polls and breakout sessions also help the online students direct their attention back every 15 to 20 minutes.

In short, one of the biggest differences of teaching cases online is that we need to find creative ways to chop long, sequential, one-way communication arguments into short, interactive, group-based responses. Digital tools such as polls and breakout rooms help, but more important is choosing a case that is conducive to facilitating a simple design of paced interactions.”

8. Benevento Foods: When the Rubber Hits the Dough

David Wood, Faculty Member, Ivey Business School

“For most of us, case teaching was exclusively an in-person practice until March of 2020. Fortunately, we have learned that online case teaching can be equally as effective when adaptations are made to a traditional teaching plan. Benevento Foods is a good example of the potential for an online case learning experience. I use this case to introduce my students to quality management.

Now online, I have replaced traditional readings with videos and activities so students can practice the key concepts that they need in order to analyze the case. Students then work together in their learning teams to complete the quantitative analysis before discussing the case asynchronously. With a good understanding of the basics, the synchronous class can focus on the more challenging aspects of quality management—people. I use the responses from students to offer an opportunity for peer-to-peer learning. I use random breakout rooms to dive deeper into the root cause of the problem. And students help each other by posting and sharing their completed models and analyses. Class is lively and full of those precious ‘aha moments’ just like when we were back on campus. Then, when class concludes, students go online to complete their learning journals, where they record their most important takeaways from Benevento Foods. ”

9. Dollar Shave Club

Karin Kollenz-Quetard, Professor of Strategy and Innovation, EDHEC Business School

“Hi, my name is Karen Kollenz, and I’m a teacher of strategy and innovation at EDHEC Business School in France. My favorite case to teach online is Dollar Shave Club . Why? Well, there are three reasons.

First, it’s a highly versatile case; I teach it in my strategy courses and in my innovation courses. And I know from colleagues that they teach it in marketing and entrepreneurship. You can teach it to all kinds of audiences. I teach it mainly with master level students, MBAs, but also with executive audiences. And I know of a colleague who has discussed the case with undergrad audiences. And last but not least, it can be adapted to different lengths. I’ve used it in one-and-a-half-hour sessions, but I’ve also used it as the basis for six hours of discussion with executives. Of course, if you talk about it for a day, you go a little bit beyond the case. So that means for us teachers, we prepare one case and we can use it in many different courses and with many different audiences.

The second reason why I like Dollar Shave Club is because it’s highly interactive. Basically, it’s super easy with this case to change the topic and the activity every 15 minutes, which I believe is really necessary for online teaching. I do use polls; I do use quizzes, mainly with Socrative, but I’ve also tried Poll Everywhere. And for short voting, I use “hand up” or the polls that are included in Zoom or Blackboard Collaborate. I also do breakout groups—at least one every one-and-a-half hours. Sometimes I do short buzz groups in addition to that, where I send students to discuss a topic for two to five minutes.

And the third reason why I love Dollar Shave Club is it’s just fun to teach. We laugh a lot in class; the advertisements for Dollar Shave Club are just hilarious. I have not seen a single student who doesn’t love watching these ads. And everybody can relate to shaving, so it’s really easy to start a discussion.

What have I changed when moving it online? Well, I think one of the main things I changed was the videos I used to show in class. That doesn’t really work perfectly in an online setting. So now I share the links in the chat, and the students watch the videos individually. Of course, as with every case, there are more planned interactions with all students using polls, quizzes, etc., as I already mentioned, which is the case for anything that you move from face to face to online. So, don’t hesitate to contact me if you think I can help you in teaching Dollar Shave Club .”

10. Uber Africa: Making Cash and Alternative Payments Work in Kenya Through Contextual Leadership

Caren B. Scheepers, Associate Professor, University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science

“I love to teach my Uber case online, whether MBA or MPhil or executive education (corporate programs). I coauthored two cases on Uber, one about Uber in Kenya, where customers’ reluctance to use credit cards resulted in a cash option and mobile money option that had to be designed, and another one on Uber South Africa’s business-model innovation response to COVID-19. I have brought in the CEO to be a guest speaker online, and the students loved it.

Another case that I love to teach is one that won the European Foundation for Case Management (EFMD) award for the best written case in Africa. It’s about SweepSouth , an electronic platform for domestic workers, which is a commercial organization with a social value creation focus. Students identify with this platform easily too, since we call it the “Uber of domestic workers,” and it works well in teaching my class entitled Contextualizing Women Entrepreneurship.

Both of these cases demonstrate the strength of the sharing economy and the impact on the triple bottom line, especially for Uber, with its sharing of rides having a positive impact on conserving our planet.

I also make a point of writing and teaching cases where the protagonist is a Black man or Black woman to balance the focus on cases with white male protagonists. ( SweepSouth features a mixed-race female entrepreneur).”

Karthik Ramanna is a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford, where he is also director of the Oxford MPP and of the Oxford Case Centre on Public Leadership. He was previously on the faculty of Harvard Business School.

Laura Huang is an associate professor of business administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. Prior to joining HBS, she was an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines early-stage entrepreneurship, and the role of interpersonal relationships and implicit factors in the investment decisions of financiers such as angel investors and VCs.

Anna A. Tavis is a professor and academic director of the Human Capital Management Department at NYU School of Professional Studies, senior fellow with the Conference Board, and the academic in residence with Executive Networks. She was named for inclusion in Thinkers50 Radar for 2020.

Mihir A. Desai is the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. His areas of expertise include tax policy, international finance, and corporate finance.

Meredith Burnett is a professorial lecturer in the Kogod School of Business at American University. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of organizational behavior and human resource management, and her research examines how individual differences and human resource policies interact to influence employee behavior. She is particularly interested in examining how these factors influence outcomes such as employee retention and employee knowledge sharing.

Christopher A. Bartlett is the Thomas D. Casserly, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School. As a practicing manager prior to HBS, he worked as a marketing manager with Alcoa in Australia, as a management consultant in McKinsey’s London office, and as the country general manager of Baxter Laboratories’ subsidiary company in France. His research interests after joining HBS in 1979 focused on the strategic and organizational challenges confronting managers in large, complex corporations, and on the organizational and managerial impact of transformational change.

Chen Lin is an assistant professor of marketing at CEIBS and a former assistant professor of marketing at the Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University. Her research interests include digital and social media, internet marketing, and empirical marketing models. She has taught marketing research, digital marketing, and business technology innovation at the EMBA, EED, and MBA levels, and has been a marketing columnist for SINA Finance , Forbes , and Economist EIU.

David Wood is a member of the faculty in operations management at Ivey Business School, as well as a graduate of both the HBA and MBA programs. He spent many years in industry as the director of sales and marketing and then as vice president of manufacturing before becoming president for W. C. Wood Company, a global manufacturer of home appliances. He has written many cases on process design, quality management, and operations strategy. Wood is the coauthor of a series of books on learning with cases and writing cases, and he has won a number of teaching awards, including the David G. Burgoyne Teaching Award and Outstanding Case Teacher from The Case Centre.

Karin Kollenz-Quetard is professor of strategy and innovation at EDHEC Business School, and she also intervenes in customized programs at other business schools such as London Business School (UK) and HEC (France). She develops and delivers face-to-face and online executive-management development programs and keynotes with a focus on strategy and innovation. In December 2016, Karin was named one of the world’s leading business school professors by Financial Times .

Caren B. Scheepers is an associate professor at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), University of Pretoria. She lectures on strategic implementation, MBA electives titled Contextual Leadership Intelligence and Diversity and Inclusion (Identity Work), and on strategic leadership on the MPhil in corporate strategy. She also developed and is hosting a GIBS Online Strategic Leadership course. She is also passionate about executive education programs and supporting companies in their strategy execution.

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• Barry Pollard
• Dec 20, 2021

Improving Core Web Vitals, A Smashing Magazine Case Study

• 27 min read
• Performance , Core Web Vitals , Case Studies , SEO
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About The Author

Barry Pollard is a web developer who is obsessed with web performance. He is the author of the Manning book “ HTTP/2 In Action ” and is a one of the maintainers … More about Barry ↬

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“Why are my Core Web Vitals failing?” Many developers have been asking themselves that question lately. Sometimes it’s easy enough to find the answer to that question and the site just needs to invest in performance . Sometimes though, it’s a little trickier and, despite thinking your site was great on the performance for some reason it still fails. That’s what happened to our very own smashingmagazine.com and figuring out, and fixing, the issue took a bit of digging.

A Cry For Help

It all started with a series of tweets last March with a cry for help :

Well, this piqued my interest! I’m a big fan of Smashing Magazine and am very interested in web performance and the Core Web Vitals. I’ve written a few articles here before on Core Web Vitals, and am always interested to see what’s in their annual Web Performance Checklist . So, Smashing Magazine knows about web performance, and if they were struggling, then this could be an interesting test case to look at!

A few of us made some suggestions on that thread as to what the problem might be after using some of our favorite web performance analysis tools like WebPageTest or PageSpeed Insights .

Investigating The LCP Issue

The issue was that LCP was too slow on mobile. LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint , is one of the three Core Web Vitals that you must “pass” to get the full search ranking boost from Google as part of their Page Experience Update . As its name suggests, LCP aims to measure when the largest content of the page is drawn (or “painted”) to the screen. Often this is the hero image or the title text. It is intended to measure what the site visitor likely came here to see.

Previous metrics measured variations of the first paint to screen (often this was a header or background color); incidental content that isn’t really what the user actually wants to get out of the page. The largest content is often a good indicator or what’s most important. And the “contentful” part of the name shows this metric is intended to ignore (e.g. background colors); they may be the largest content, but they are not “contentful”, so don’t count for LCP and instead the algorithm tries to find something better.

LCP only looks at the initial viewport. As soon as you scroll down or otherwise interact with the page the LCP element is fixed and we can calculate how long it took to draw that element from when the page first started loading — and that’s your LCP!

There are many ways of measuring your Core Web Vitals , but the definitive way — even if it’s not the best way, as we’ll see soon — is in Google Search Console (GSC). From an SEO perspective, it doesn’t really matter what other tools tell you, GSC is what Google Search sees. Of course, it matters what your users experience rather than what some search engine crawler sees, but one of the great things about the Core Web Vitals initiative is that it does measure real user experience rather than what Google Bot sees! So, if GSC says you have bad experiences, then you do have bad experiences according to your users .

Search Console told Smashing Magazine that their LCP on mobile for most of their pages needed improving. A standard enough output of that part of GSC and pretty easily addressed: just make your LCP element draw faster! This shouldn’t take too long. Certainly not six months (or so we thought). So, first up is finding out what the LCP element is.

Running a failing article page through WebPageTest highlighted the LCP element:

Improving The LCP Image

OK, so the article author photo is the LCP element. The first instinct is to ask what could we do to make that faster? This involves delving into waterfalls, seeing when the image is requested, how long it takes to download, and then deciding how to optimize that. Here, the image was well optimized in terms of size and format (usually the first, and easiest option for improving the performance of images!). The image was served from a separate assets domain (often bad for performance), but it wasn’t going to be possible to change that in the short term, and Smashing Magazine had already added a preconnect resource hint to speed that up as best they could.

As I mentioned before, Smashing Magazine knows about web performance, had only recently worked on improving their performance , and had done everything right here, but still were failing. Interesting…

Other suggestions rolled in, including reducing load, delaying the service worker (to avoid contention), or investigating HTTP/2 priorities, but they didn’t have the necessary impact on the LCP timing. So we had to reach into our web performance toolbag for all the tips and tricks to see what else we could do here.

If a resource is critical to the page load, you can inline it, so it’s included in the HTML itself. That way, the page includes everything necessary to do the initial paint without delays. For example, Smashing Magazine already inlines critical CSS to allow a quick first paint but did not inline the author’s image. Inlining is a double-edged sword and must be used with caution. It beefs up the page and means subsequent page views do not benefit from the fact that data is already downloaded. I’m not a fan of over-inlining because of this and think it must be used with caution.

So, it’s not normally recommended to inline images. However, here the image was causing us real problems, was reasonably small, and was directly linked to the page. Yes, if you read a lot of articles by that one author it’s a waste to redownload the same image multiple times instead of downloading the author’s image once and reusing it, but in all likelihood, you’re here to read different articles by different authors .

There have been a few advances in image formats recently, but AVIF is causing a stir as it’s here already (at least in Chrome and Firefox ), and it has impressive compression results over the old JPEG formats traditionally used for photographs. Vitaly didn’t want to inline the JPEG version of the author images, but investigated whether inlining the AVIF version would work. Compressing the author image using AVIF, and then base64-ing the image into the HTML led to a 3 KB increase to the HTML page weight — which is tiny and so was acceptable.

Since AVIF was only supported in Chrome at the time (it came to Firefox after all this), and since Core Web Vitals is a Google initiative, it did feel slightly “icky” optimizing for a Google browser because of a Google edict. Chrome is often at the forefront of new feature support and that’s to be commended, but it always feels a little off when those two sides of its business impact each other. Still, this was a new standard image format rather than some proprietary Chrome-only format (even if it was only supported in Chrome initially), and was a progressive enhancement for performance (Safari users still get the same content, just not quite as fast), so with the addition of the AVIF twist Smashing took the suggestion and inlined the image and did indeed see impressive results in lab tools. Problem solved!

An Alternative LCP

So, we let that bed in and waited the usual 28 days or so for the Core Web Vitals numbers to all turn green… but they didn’t. They flitted between green and amber so we’d certainly improved things, but hadn’t solved the issue completely. After staying a long stretch in the amber “needs improvement” section, Vitaly reached out to see if there were any other ideas.

The image was drawing quickly. Not quite instantly (it still takes time to process an image after all) but as near as it could be. To be honest, I was running out of ideas but took another look with fresh eyes. And then an alternative idea struck me — were we optimizing the right LCP element? Authors are important of course, but is that really what the reader came here to see? Much as our egos would like to say yes, and that our beautiful shining mugs are much more important than the content we write, the readers probably don’t think that (readers, huh — what can you do!).

The reader came for the article, not the author. So the LCP element should reflect that, which might also solve the LCP image drawing issue. To do that we just put the headline above the author image, and increased the font size on mobile a bit. This may sound like a sneaky trick to fool the Core Web Vital SEO Gods at the expense of the users, but in this case, it helps both! Although many sites do try to go for the quick and easy hack or optimize for GoogleBot over real users, this was not a case of that and we were quite comfortable with the decision here. In fact, further tweaks remove the author image completely on mobile view, where there’s limited space and that article currently looks like this on mobile, with the LCP element highlighted:

Here we show the title, the key information about the article and the start of the summary — much more useful to the user, than taking up all the precious mobile screen space with a big photo!

And that’s one of the main things I like about the Core Web Vitals: they are measuring user experience.

To improve the metrics, you have to improve the experience. “

And NOW we were finally done. Text draws much quicker than images so that should sort out the LCP issue. Thank you all very much and good night!

I Hate That CWV Graph In Google Search Console…

Again we were disappointed. That didn’t solve the issue and it wasn’t long before the Google Search Console graph returned to amber:

At this point, we should talk a little more about page groupings and Core Web Vitals. You might have noticed from the above graph that pretty much the whole graph swings at once. But there was also a core group of about 1,000 pages that stayed green most of the time. Why is that?

Well, Google Search Console categorizes pages into page groupings and measures the Core Web Vitals metrics of those page groupings . This is an attempt to fill in missing data for those pages that don’t get enough traffic to have meaningful user experience data. There’s a number of ways that they could have tackled this: they could have just not given any ranking boost to such pages, or maybe assumed the best and given a full boost to pages without any data. Or they could have fallen back to origin-level core web vitals data. Instead, they tried to do something more clever, which was an attempt to be helpful, but is in many ways also more confusing: Page groupings .

Basically, every page is assigned a page grouping. How they do this isn’t made clear, but URLs and technologies used on the page have been mentioned before. You also can’t see what groupings Google has chosen for each of your pages, and if their algorithm got it right, which is another frustrating thing for website owners, though they do give sample URLs for each different Core Web Vitals score below the graph in Google Search Console from which the grouping can sometimes be implied.

Page groupings can work well for sites like Smashing Magazine. For other sites, page groupings may be less clear, and many sites may just have one grouping. The Smashing site, however, has several different types of pages: articles, author pages, guides, and so on. If an article page is slow because the author image is the LCP image is slow to load, then that will likely be the case for all article pages. And the fix will likely be the same for all article pages. So grouping them together there makes sense (assuming Google can accurately figure out the page groupings).

However, where it can get confusing is when a page does get enough visitors to get its own Core Web Vitals score and it passes, but it’s lumped in with a failing group. You can call the CrUX API for all the pages in your site, see most of them are passing, then be confused when those same pages are showing as failing in Search Console because they’ve been lumped in a group with failing URLs and most of the traffic for that group is for failing. I still wonder if Search Console should use page-level Core Web Vital data when it has, rather than always using the grouping data.

Anyway, that accounts for the large swings. Basically, all the articles (of which there are about 3,000) appear to be in the same page grouping (not unreasonably!) and that page grouping is either passing or failing. When it switches, the graph moves dramatically .

You can also get more detailed data on the Core Web Vitals through the CrUX API. This is available at an origin-level (i.e. for the whole site), or for individual URLs (where enough data exists), but annoyingly not at the page grouping level. I’d been tracking the origin level LCP using the CrUX API to get a more precise measure of the LCP and it showed a depressing story too:

We can see we’ve never really “solved” the issue and the amount of “Good” pages (the green line above) still hovered too close to the 75% pass rate. Additionally the p75 LCP score (the dotted line which uses the right-hand axis) never really moved far enough away from the 2500 milliseconds threshold. It was no wonder the pages passing and failing were flipping back and forth. A bit of a bad day, with a few more slow page loads, was enough to flip the whole page grouping into the “needs improvement” category. We needed something more to give us some headroom to be able to absorb these “bad days”.

At this point, it was tempting to optimize further . We know the article title was the LCP element so what could we do to further improve that? Well, it uses a font, and fonts have always been a bane of web performance so we could look into that.

But hold up a minute. Smashing Magazine WAS a fast site. Running it through web performance tools like Lighthouse and WebPageTest showed that — even on slower network speeds. And it was doing everything right! It was built as a static site generator so didn’t require any server-side generation to occur, it inlined everything for the initial paint so there were no resource loading constraints other than the HTML itself, it was hosted by Netlify on a CDN so should be near its users.

Sure, we could look at removing the font, but if Smashing Magazine couldn’t deliver a fast experience given all that, then how could anyone else? Passing Core Web Vitals shouldn’t be impossible, nor require you to only be on a plain site with no fonts or images. Something else was up here and it was time to find out a bit more about what was going on instead of just blindly attempting another round of optimizations.

Digging A Little Deeper Into The Metrics

Smashing Magazine didn’t have a RUM solution so instead we delved into the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data that Google collects for the top 8 million or so websites and then makes that data available to query in various forms. It’s this CrUX data that drives the Google Search Console data and ultimately the ranking impact. We’d already been using the CrUX API above but decided to delve into other CrUX resources.

We used the sitemap and a Google Sheets script to look at all the CrUX data for the whole site where it was available (Fabian Krumbholz has since created a much more comprehensive tool to make this easier!) and it showed mixed results for pages . Some pages passed, while others, particularly older pages, were failing.

The CrUX dashboard didn’t really tell us much that we didn’t already know in this instance: the LCP was borderline, and unfortunately not trending down:

Digging into the other stats (TTFB, First Paint, Online, DOMContentLoaded) didn’t give us any hints. There was, however, a noticeable increase in mobile usage:

Was this part of a general trend in mobile adoption? Could that be what was affecting the mobile LCP despite the improvements we’d done? We had questions but no answers or solutions.

One thing I wanted to look at was the global distribution of the traffic. We’d noticed in Google Analytics a lot of traffic from India to old articles — could that be an issue?

The India Connection

Country-level CrUX data isn’t available in the CrUX dashboard but is available in the BigQuery CrUX dataset, and running a query in there at the www.smashingmagazine.com origin level shows a wide disparity in LCP values (the SQL is included on the second tab of that link btw in case you want to try the same thing on your own domain). Based on the top 10 countries in Google Analytics we have the following data:

India traffic is a big proportion for Smashing Magazine (16%) and it is not meeting the target for LCP at an origin level. That could be the problem and certainly was worth investigating further . There was also the Philippines and Pakistan data with very bad scores but that was a relatively small amount of traffic.

At this point, I had an inkling what might be going on here, and a potential solution so got Smashing Magazine to install the web-vitals library to collect RUM data and post it back to Google Analytics for analysis. After a few days of collecting, we used the Web Vitals Report to give us a lot at the data in ways we hadn’t been able to see before, in particular, the country-level breakdown:

And there it was. All the top countries in the analytics did have very good LCP scores, except one: India. Smashing Magazine uses Netlify which is a global CDN and it does have a Mumbai presence , so it should be as performant as other countries, but some countries are just slower than others (more on this later).

However, the mobile traffic for India was only just outside the 2500 limit, and it was only the second most visited country. Surely the good USA scores should have been enough to offset that? Well, the above two graphs show the countries order by traffic. But CrUX counts mobile and desktop traffic separately (and tablet btw, but no one ever seems to care about that!). What happens if we filter the traffic to just mobile traffic ? And one step further — just mobile Chrome traffic (since only Chrome feeds CrUX and so only Chrome counts towards CWV)? Well then we get a much more interesting picture:

India is actually the top mobile Chrome visitor, by quite some way — nearly triple the next highest visitor (USA)! The Philippines, with its poor score has also shot up there to the number three spot, and Nigeria and Pakistan with their poor scores are also registering in the top 10. Now the bad overall LCP scores on mobile were starting to make sense.

While the mobile has overtaken desktop as the most popular way to access the Internet in the, so-called, Western world , there still is a fair mix of mobile and desktop here — often tied to our working hours where many of us are sat in front of a desktop. The next billion users may not be the same, and mobile plays a much bigger part in those countries. The above stats show this is even true for sites like Smashing Magazine that you might consider would get more traffic from designers and developers sitting in front of desktops while designing and developing!

Additionally because CrUX only measures from Chrome users , that means countries with more iPhones (like the USA) will have a much smaller proportion of their mobile users represented in CrUX and so in Core Web Vitals, so additionally amplifying the effect of those countries.

Core Web Vitals Are Global

Core Web Vitals don’t have a different threshold per country, and it doesn’t matter if your site is visited by different countries — it simply registers all Chrome users the same. Google has confirmed this before , so Smashing Magazine will not get the ranking boost for the good USA scores, and not get it for the India users. Instead, all users go into the melting pot , and if the score for those page groupings do not meet the threshold, then the ranking signal for all users is affected.

Unfortunately, the world is not an even place. And web performance does vary hugely by country , and shows a clear divide between richer and poorer countries. Technology costs money, and many countries are more focused on getting their populations online at all, rather than on continually upgrading infrastructure to the latest and greatest tech.

The lack of other browsers (like Firefox or iPhones) in CrUX has always been known, but we’ve always considered it more of a blind spot for measuring Firefox or iPhone performance. This example shows the impact is much bigger , and for sites with global traffic, it skews the results significantly in favor of Chrome users, which often means poor countries, which often means worse connectivity.

Should Core Web Vitals Be Split By Country?

On the one hand, it seems unfair to hold websites to the same standard if the infrastructure varies so much. Why should Smashing Magazine be penalized or held to a higher standard than a similar website that is only read by designers and developers from the Western world? Should Smashing Magazine block Indian users to keep the Core Web Vitals happy (I want to be quite clear here that this never came up in discussion, so please do take this as the author making the point and not a sleight on Smashing!).

On the other hand, “giving up” on some countries by accepting their slowness risks permanently relegating them to the lower tier many of them are in. It’s hardly the average Indian reader of Smashing Magazine’s fault that their infrastructure is slower and in many ways, these are the people that deserve more highlighting and effort, rather than less!

And it’s not just a rich country versus poor country debate. Let’s take the example of a French website which is aimed at readers in France, funded by advertising or sales from France, and has a fast website in that country. However, if the site is read by a lot of French Canadians, but suffers because the company does not use a global CDN, then should that company suffer in French Google Search because it’s not as fast to those Canadian users? Should the company be “held to ransom” by the threat of Core Web Vitals and have to invest in the global CDN to keep those Canadian readers, and so Google happy?

Well, if a significant enough proportion of your viewers are suffering then that’s exactly what the Core Web Vital’s initiative is supposed to surface. Still, it’s an interesting moral dilemma which is a side effect of the Core Web Vitals initiative being linked to SEO ranking boost : money always changes things!

One idea could be to keep the limits the same, but measure them per country . The French Google Search site could give a ranking boost to those users in French (because those users pass CWV for this site), while Google Search Canada might not (because they fail). That would level the playing field and measure sites to each country, even if the targets are the same.

Similarly, Smashing Magazine could rank well in the USA and other countries where they pass, but be ranked against other Indian sites (where the fact they are in the “needs improvement” segment might actually still be better than a lot of sites there, assuming they all suffer the same performance constraints).

Sadly, I think that would have a negative effect, with some countries again being ignored while sites only justify web performance investment for more lucrative countries. Plus, as this example already illustrates, the Core Web Vitals are already complicated enough without bringing nearly 200 additional dimensions into play by having one for every country in the world!

So How To Fix It?

So we now finally knew why Smashing Magazine was struggling to pass Core Web Vitals but what, if anything, could be done about it? The hosting provider (Netlify) already has the Mumbai CDN, which should therefore provide a fast access for Indian users, so was this a Netlify problem to improve that? We had optimized the site as much as possible so was this just something they were going to have to live with? Well no, we now return to our idea from earlier: optimizing the web fonts a bit more .

We could take the drastic option of not delivering fonts at all. Or perhaps not delivering fonts to certain locations (though that would be more complicated, given the SSG nature of Smashing Magazine’s website). Alternatively, we could wait and load fonts in the front end, based on certain criteria, but that risked slowing down fonts for others while we assessed that criteria. If only there was some easy-to-use browser signal for when we should take this drastic action. Something like the SaveData header , which is intended exactly for this!

SaveData And prefers-reduced-data

SaveData is a setting that users can turn on in their browser when they really want to… well save data. This can be useful for people on restricted data plans, for those traveling with expensive roaming charges, or for those in countries where the infrastructure isn’t quite as fast as we’d like.

Users can turn on this setting in browsers that support it, and then websites can then use this information to optimize their sites even more than usual. Perhaps returning lower quality images (or turning images off completely!), or not using fonts. And the best thing about this setting is that you are acting upon the user’s request, and not arbitrarily making a decision for them (many Indian users might have fast access and not want a restricted version of the website!).

The Save Data information is available in two (soon to be three!) ways:

• A SaveData header is sent on each HTTP request. This allows dynamic backends to change the HTML returned.
• The NetworkInformation.saveData JavaScript API. This allows front-end scripts to check this and act accordingly.
• The upcoming prefers-reduced-data media query, allowing CSS to set different options depending on this setting. This is available behind a flag in Chrome, but not yet on by default while it finishes standardization .

So the question is, do many of the Smashing Magazine readers (and particularly those in the countries struggling with Core Web Vitals) use this option and is this something we can therefore use to serve them a faster site? Well, when we added the web-vitals script mentioned above, we also decided to measure that, as well as the Effective Connection Type. You can see the full script here . After a bit of time allowing it to collect we could display the results in a simple /Google Analytics dashboard, along with the Chrome browser version:

So, the good news was that a large proportion of mobile Indian users (about two-thirds) did have this setting set. The ECT was less useful with most showing as 4g. I’ve argued before that this API has gotten less and less useful as most users are classified under this 4g setting. Plus using this value effectively for initial loads is fraught with issues .

More good news as most users seem to be on an up-to-date Chrome so would benefit from newer features like the prefers-reduced-data media query when it becomes fully available.

Ilya from the Smashing team applied the JavaScript API version to their font-loader script so additional fonts are not loaded for these users. The Smashing folks also applied the prefers-reduce-data media query to their CSS so fallback fonts are used rather than custom web fonts for the initial render, but this will not be taking effect for most users until that setting moves out of the experimental stage.

I Love That Graph In Google Search Console

And did it work? Well, we’ll let Google Search Console tell that store as it showed us the good news a couple of weeks later:

Additionally, since this was introduced in mid-November, the original level LCP score has steadily ticked downwards:

There’s still not nearly enough headroom to make me comfortable, but I’m hopeful that this will be enough for now, and will only improve when the prefers-reduced-data media query comes into play — hopefully soon.

Of course, a surge in traffic from mobile users with bad connectivity could easily be enough to flip the site back into the amber category, which is why you want that headroom, so I’m sure the Smashing team will be keeping a close eye on their Google Search Console graph for a bit longer, but I feel we’ve made the best efforts basis to improve the experience of users so I am hopeful it will be enough.

Impact Of The User Experience Ranking Factor

The User Experience ranking factor is supposed to be a small differentiator at the moment, and maybe we worried too much about a small issue that is, in many ways outside of our control? If Smashing Magazine is borderline, and the impact is small, then maybe the team should worry about other issues instead of obsessing over this one? But I can understand that and, as I said, Smashing Magazine are knowledgeable in performance and so understand why they wanted to solve — or at the very least understand! — this issue.

So, was there any impact? Interestingly we did see a large uptick in search impression in the last week at the same time as it flipped to green:

It’s since reverted back to normal, so this may have been an unrelated blip but interesting nonetheless!

Conclusions

So, an interesting case study with a few important points to take away:

• When RUM (including CrUX or Google Search Console) tells you there’s a problem, there probably is! It’s all too easy to try to compare your experiences and then blame the metric.
• Implementing your own RUM solution gives you access to much more valuable data than the high-level data CrUX is intended to provide, which can help you drill down into issues, plus also give you potentially more information about the devices your site visitors are using to visit your site.
• Core Web Vitals are global, and that causes some interesting challenges for global sites like Smashing Magazine. This can make it difficult to understand CrUX numbers unless you have a RUM solution and perhaps Google Search Console or CrUX could help surface this information more?
• Chrome usage also varies throughout the world, and on mobile is biased towards poorer countries where more expensive iPhones are less prevalent.
• Core Web Vitals are getting much better at measuring User Experience. But that doesn’t mean every user has to get the same user experience — especially if they are telling you (through things like the Save Data option) that they would actually prefer a different experience.

I hope that this case study helps others in a similar situation, who are struggling to understand their Core Web Vitals. And I hope you can use the information here to make the experience better for your website visitors.

Happy optimizing!

Note: It should be noted that Vitaly, Ilya and others at the Smashing team did all the work here, and a lot more performance improvements were not covered in the above article. I just answered a few queries for them on this specific problem over the last 6 months and then suggested this article might make an interesting case study for other readers to learn from.

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, predicting online channel use for an online and print magazine: a case study.

Internet Research

ISSN : 1066-2243

Article publication date: 6 June 2008

The purpose of this paper is to develop and empirically test a conceptual model to predict the determinants of online channel use in a multi‐channel environment.

Design/methodology/approach

A case study of a free, multi‐channel entertainment magazine is used to statistically analyse a proposed model of customers' channel use ( n =224) using an online survey of real consumers.

The findings in the paper confirm a number of determinants of consumer attitudes. Subjective norms and consumer attitudes positively affect behavioural intention to use and intentions directly relate to actual use. The results also indicate that three constructs (i.e. enjoyment, marketing efforts and age), one from each three main determinant groups (i.e. marketing variables, individual difference variables and channel attributes), are likely to be an accurate predictor of consumer attitudes.

Practical implications

The paper shows that enjoyment was an important factor among the younger, socially aware and somewhat hedonistically‐oriented consumers of the magazine. Firms should track consumer preferences from registration and then should try to create activities that give consumers enjoyment. Linking together of marketing efforts is very important. Advertising can be a great opportunity to grow online operations. Search engines and the use of incentives (prizes) can be useful in this regard. Firms should also advertise their web site through the offline channel or any places that can reach target consumers. A good mix of offline and online advertising can present a message and reinforce it for consumers in different channels.

Originality/value

This paper contributes towards understanding consumer behaviour in the online channel use context in a multi‐channel environment.

• Consumer behaviour
• Online operations

Srisuwan, P. and Barnes, S.J. (2008), "Predicting online channel use for an online and print magazine: a case study", Internet Research , Vol. 18 No. 3, pp. 266-285. https://doi.org/10.1108/10662240810883317

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Copyright © 2008, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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Researchers know that older adults can suffer serious symptoms from COVID-19, and Case Western Reserve's Pushpa Pandiyan is working to understand why.

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9 places to nosh on bagels in southern Maine

From old-school spots to foodie favorites, there's a 'hole' lot to try.

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Bread and bagels at The Works Cafe in downtown Portland. Photo by Aimsel Ponti

From New York-style boiled bagels to Montreal-inspired wood-fired ones, there’s lots of great bagels in southern Maine and several shops have the accolades to back that up.

In 2023, Bon Appetit named bagels from Rose Foods and Rover Bagel among the best in the country.

Two years before that,  Food & Wine Magazine put Rover, Forage and Scratch Baking Co. on its list of best bagels in the U.S.

Whether you like yours toasted with cream cheese or as the bread for your breakfast sandwich, you can find plenty of styles and flavors from Biddeford to Brunswick.

BEACH BAGELS

The offerings at Beach Bagels include a French toast and marble bagel, and the cream cheese menu comprises spreads like strawberry, olive and honey walnut. Along with breakfast sandwiches, Beach Bagels has hearty breakfast options like omelets and pancakes. Best of all, you’re steps away from a beach stroll. Just don’t let the seagulls steal your bagel. Advertisement

WHEN: 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily WHERE: 34 Old Orchard St., Old Orchard Beach. beachbagels.yolasite.com ______________

Dutchman’s opened in 2022 as a pop-up housed at Nomad pizza in Brunswick’s Fort Andross building. It’s since become a permanent fixture there and uses the pizzeria’s wood-fired ovens to bake its bagels. The hand-shaped, honey-boiled bagels come in plain, roasted garlic, poppy and a bagel-of-the-day flavor.

WHEN: 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday to Sunday WHERE: Fort Andross, 14 Maine St., Brunswick. dutchmans.me ______________

FORAGE MARKET

Making bagels at Forage Market involves a two-day aging process. The bagels are naturally leavened with wild yeast starter and baked next to a hardwood fire. There are usually five flavors available, including sesame and garlic. Breakfast sandwiches (including vegan options) are available. Forage also has a location in Lewiston. Advertisement

WHEN: 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday WHERE: 123 Washington Ave., Portland. foragemarket.com _____________

MISTER BAGEL

There are 10 or so Mister Bagel locations in Maine, including South Portland and Falmouth. It all began with the Portland location, which was the first bagel shop to open in Maine. The late Rick Hartglass started Mister Bagel in 1977, and it is still a family business. Music fans will appreciate the breakfast sandwich menu, which includes The David Bowie (bacon, egg and American cheese), the Jimmy Buffett (egg with roast beef and cheddar) and The Lady Gaga (avocado, salt and pepper, with or without egg).

WHEN: 6:30 a.m. to noon Monday to Friday, 7 a.m. to noon Saturday and Sunday WHERE: 599 Forest Ave., Portland. misterbagelforestave.com ______________

At Rose Foods, the menu varies depending on the day, but there are usually six to eight flavors available. For example, should you pop in on a Friday, you’ll find a poppy and onion bialy (a cousin of the bagel that is not boiled). Rose Foods also makes a number of bagel sandwiches, including the Classic Nova with Nova lox and the Classic Whitefish. Advertisement

WHEN: 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily WHERE: 428 Forest Ave., Portland. rosefoods.me

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ROVER BAGEL

At Rover Bagel, you’ll find wood-fired plain, poppy, sea salt, sesame and everything bagels available most of the time, and the spread game here is strong with cream cheese options like lemon-thyme-honey cream and chili-garlic.

WHEN: 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, 8 a.m. to noon Sunday WHERE: 10 West Point Lane Suite 10-204, Biddeford (Pepperell Mill). roverbagel.com

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SCRATCH BAKING CO.

You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced the line of devoted fans waiting for Scratch Baking Co. to open, especially on weekend mornings. Along with the popular Maine sea salt, plain and other everyday flavors, Scratch has a daily special bagel. There’s honeyed rosemary on Wednesday and jalapeno cheddar on Thursday. Scratch is also famous, at least to locals, for its P-Cheese spread. It’s a pimento cheese recipe made with cheddar, mayo, roasted red peppers and seasoning and was passed down to co-owner and head baker Allison Reid by her grandmother, Mern.

WHEN: 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday, 7 a.m. to noon Sunday WHERE: 416 Preble St., South Portland. scratchbakingco.com ___________

THE MAINE BAGEL

The Maine Bagel is a drive-thru with several breakfast and other kinds of sandwiches available. With a bagel list that features egg and bialy among the standards, the family-owned spot is the perfect place to stop on your way to Pine Point Beach. The Maine Bagel really shines with a dozen kinds of cream cheese spreads, including raisin-walnut, lox, strawberry, cranberry-nut and bacon-chive.

WHEN: 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. WHERE: 117 Route 1, Scarborough. themainebagel.com Advertisement

THE WORKS CAFE

The Works Cafe is an institution on the edge of the Portland’s Old Port. It opened in 1990 as Bagel Works before it changed its name in 2002. The original shop in this regional chain opened in Manchester, Vermont, in 1988, and there are 11 locations around New England, though just the one in Maine. Gone are the ’90s-era banana-walnut bagels and cold pizza cream cheese, but The Works Cafe is still a reliable place to grab a salt, multigrain or cinnamon raisin bagel, among others. The menu also has bowls, sandwiches and smoothies.

WHEN: 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily WHERE: 15 Temple St., Portland. workscafe.com

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