Core Web Vitals are three metrics that just became super important ranking factors as Google strives to make all web traffic user experience better.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are 3 basic factor and a few small factors that will impact Google Ranking going forward.
The 3 Major factors are LCP, FID, CLS, but google will also take into account if the page is mobile friendly, secure, has HTTPS and has no intrusive interstitials.
Largest Contentful Paint
As per Google: “The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport.” Basically what the means that if you have images, videos , large text blocks or even background loading via url that takes more than 2.5 sec to load you need to cut down that time. There are several ways to do that the most important being * optimize * your * Images. Often when surfing the web we come across images being used somewhere that text could have better serviced in, its time to cut that out and move to the future. More and more Google is focusing on natural linking and web experiences over pages optimized for Google Bots.
First Input Delay
FID measures the time between a user interacts with a page and the time it takes browser to start processing event handlers in response. FID optimization is developer heavy so I’ll just link to Google’s official documentation below and let them explain. Lighthouse and GTMetrix are super helpful tools you can use to optimize your webpages.
Cumulative Layout Shift
CLS is the annoying and now cost habit of some websites to change their layout in the middle of a session. CLS measures the sum total of all individual layout shift scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan of the page. A layout shift is every time a visible element changes positions on the page. A site with a good user experience should have a CLS score of less than or equal to 0.1.
Google is taking a much needed look at the need to make the web good for users. More and more users and their preference will count for more over people churning out content for Google Bots and I for one applaud Google’s commitment.
Read more about User engagement metrics here
Resources:
[…] Technical Analysis is looking for bugs or issues in your website. You look at issues like site speed and if your content is tailored more to a specific browser or device. Web Core Vitals are a nifty way of looking at this. You can see if your website has issues in the content that causes it to load slower. A reminder here, Core Web Vitals are Largest Contextual Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Shift Layout. LCP needs to be under 2.5 secs for best results, FID needs to be below 100 ms and CLS needs to be less than 0.1. You can read more here. […]