What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience. They are part of Google’s Web Vitals initiative, which aims to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.
Do Core Web Vitals Matter?
If you want to rank well on Google, they do. But it’s important to note that these factors are not arbitrary. Each is directly reflected in user behaviour. Poor web vitals result in high user bounce rates. It doesn’t matter how hard you slaved over your site; it doesn’t matter how good your content is if your users left a second before your web page loaded.
Why Does Google Care? How do Core Web Vitals affect SEO?
Google relies on advertising revenue. They can sell that advertising space at the top of the search results because they know that space will be seen by a lot of people.
How can they ensure that a lot of people will see that space?
By being the best search engine.
Each time Google displays an advert in the SERP (search engine results page), it surrounds it with quality content – the search results themselves. In this instance, quality is a complex measurement; it doesn’t just mean the veracity of your facts, the panache of your prose or the brilliance of your wit. Quality requires that users spend time on the search results they finally click upon. Great search results are the results that the users want – both in terms of content and experience.
Great search results are what the users keep coming back for. And Core Web Vitals help Google judge what pages those might be.
What are the Core Web Vital parameters?
The Core Web Vitals focus on three main aspects:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures a page’s load performance. It aims to quantify the time the page‘s main content takes to load. A good LCP is 2.5 seconds or faster.
- First Input Delay (FID): This metric measures interactivity. Specifically, it measures the time from when a user first interacts with a site (i.e., when they click a link, tap on a button, etc.) to when the browser can actually process event handlers in response to that interaction. A good FID is less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Web pages are built out of many files, and some visual disturbance is likely as the various elements load (see below). This metric measures visual stability and helps quantify how often users experience unexpected layout shifts — a common complaint among web users. A good CLS is less than 0.1.
How Do I Find my Core Web Vitals?
Use Google Lighthouse. Load your website in Chrome and right-click anywhere. A menu should spring up and the last element will be ‘Inspect’. Select this and the developer tools will appear. It‘s a busy screen, but look for the Lighthouse link.
Click the Analyze Page Load button to generate a Lighthouse report. It is quite easy to read.
These metrics are essential for website owners and developers because Google uses them to help determine page rankings in its search engine results. Improving these metrics can lead to a better user experience, potentially increasing engagement and conversions.
My Core Web Vitals Stink! What Can I Do?
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