Does your website have what it takes to impress Google and get top rank in the Google search results? Why are core web vitals important?
User experience (UX) has been the talk of the town in the past many years, especially when it comes to websites.
Now with the announcement of Google on yet another set of metrics that measure the user experience of a web page, it’s OFFICIAL — User experience (UX) is now not only the talk of the town, but it’s also a solid factor that contributes to how your website ranks on Google.
With this official announcement, we can foresee that in the near future, businesses, website design agencies and digital marketers will soon focus heavily on website user experience to drive web traffic, leads and revenue.
Read this article and find out how your business can benefit from the latest Google algorithm update.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics related to Speed, Interactivity and Visual Stability.
Google has defined the following as the Core Web Vitals:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). The amount of time it takes for a page’s main content to load. The ideal LCP should occur within 2.4 seconds from the moment the page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID). The amount of time required for a page to become interactive. A perfect measurement is less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). The number of unexpected layout shifts of visual page content. The ideal measurement is less than 0.1.
This set of metrics was designed to help us to measure the user experience when it comes to the page loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
Site Owners and SEO specialists can focus on these metrics to deliver a better user experience and improve SEO.
Will it affect the rankings in the Google Search Engine?
Yes. If Google determines that a page provides a high-quality user experience based on its page experience signal, the page will most likely be ranked higher in search engines.
However, content relevance is still one of the essential factors when it comes to rankings. A page with highly relevant content to a query may rank well even if it has a low page experience signal.
Well, ideally it should achieve both: provide highly relevant content and high page experience signal.
Fix User Experience with a Core Web Vitals report
Google has introduced a Core Web Vitals report to show how good your page performance is based on real-world usage data (also known as field data).
The Core Web vitals report only shows URL performance grouped by status, metric type and URL group (groups of similar web pages).
Your URLs must be indexed and only appear in this report. The report will be based on three metrics mentioned earlier.
When a URL reaches a certain amount of data for any metric, the page status is the status of its worst-performing metric.
Steps to navigate the report
- Toggle the Poor, Needs Improvement or Good tabs on the overview page chart. You can see how URLs on your site perform based on historical user data.
- Click “Open Report”. You are able to see the mobile or desktop summary page, showing page performance numbers for each platform.
- Click a row in the table to see details. All about URL groups affected by the selected issues including a set of example URLs.
- Click a URL in the Example table of the issues details page. You are able to see more information related to URLs and similar URLs.
*For more information about Core Web Vitals, visit this page.
Other user experience signals
SEOs and site owners can also measure the other type of user experience signals:
- Mobile Friendliness: Evaluate web performance on mobile devices. Use Google’s mobile-friendly test.
- Safe Browsing. Ensure the URLs against Google’s are constantly updated of unsafe web resources. Check the Security Issues report in Search Console for any issues with safe browsing.
- HTTPS: An authentication and security protocol implemented in browsers. For pages that load over a secure HTTPS connection, it will display a lock icon in the browser address bar. The URL will begin with HTTPS.
- No instructive interstitials. Ensure no blocking or popup ads on almost or all the page as this can lead to a bad user experience for desktop and mobile users alike.
Workflow to Optimise User Experience with Core Web Vitals
Web.dev comes as a guideline on the workflow to recommend optimising the user experience with Core web vitals.
Here are the workflows to optimise for a better user experience:
Identify the issues
- Use the Search Console’s new Core Web Vitals report. Identify the groups of pages that require attention (based on field data).
- Use PageSpeed Insights once you’ve identified pages that need to work out. Diagnose lab and field issues on a page.
*PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is available via Search Console or by entering a URL on PSI directly. - Use GTMetrix tools to evaluate the overall website performance and web vitals score. It highlights specific elements that are causing the issues.
(GTMetrix is strongly recommended as it is the best tools to use)
*Note: There’s no right answer on which tools are the best. Each tool serves different purposes and is ideal based on a case-by-case basis. It’s recommended to try all the tools listed here.
Optimise the issues
- Use Lighthouse and Chrome Devtools. Measure Core Web Vitals and get actionable advice on exactly what to fix. The Web Vitals Chrome extension provides a real-time view of metrics on the desktop.
Evaluating and Analysis Report
- Use the updated CrUX Dashboard or new Chrome UX Report AI for field data or PageSpeed Insights API for lab data. Create a custom dashboard for Core Web Vitals.
Guidance
Measure your page at web.dev/measure to show you a prioritized set of guides and codelabs for optimization, using PSI data/
Deploy the change to Production
- Use Lighthouse CI on a pull request to ensure there are no regressions in Core Web Vitals before you deploy a change to production.
So there you go, the latest algorithm update, ‘Core Web Vitals’ by Google, which will surely affect how businesses want their website to be in the future. Need a website to revamp? Exabytes offers professional web design services to give you total peace of mind.
We also offer managed SEO service to help business to improve the search ranking in Google. Get in touch with us today. We offer FREE consultation.
