Improving your Core Web Vitals
When it comes to running a digital business, it’s important to pay close attention to Google ranking updates and look for cost-effective ways to boost organic rankings. After all, the better your SEO performance, the more traffic, leads and conversions you’re likely to receive. And this is all great news for profit and credibility.
So what’s going on in the Google headquarters and should you be improving your Core Web Vitals? We’re taking a closer look.
Core Website Vitals Update – What You Need to Know
Google has confirmed that Core Web Vitals are becoming ranking signals for search results in May 2021 in an update that will also combine existing UX-related signals. Put simply, Google is homing in on the user experience and prioritising pages that consider the journey of the consumer. Core web vitals metrics consist of:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This measures the speed at which a page’s main content is loaded. This should occur within 2.5 seconds of landing on a page with anything more considered to impact the user experience negatively.
- First Input Delay (FID). This measures the speed at which users can interact with a page after landing on it. Interaction should be able to occur within 100 milliseconds. Yes, this is superfast, but speed is of paramount important to Google and the end user.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This measures how often users experience unexpected layout shifts. Pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.
Do I Need to Meet the Minimum Threshold for all Core Vitals?
Yes! While Google’s John Mueller is careful not to reveal more that has been announced on Google’s official channels, he seems to imply that all three Core Web Vitals benchmarks must be met in order to qualify for the ranking signal boost rolling out later this year.
Mueller states: “My understanding is we see if it’s in the green and then that counts as it’s OK or not. So if it’s in yellow then that wouldn’t be in the green, but I don’t know what the final approach there will be.
There are a number of factors that come together, and I think the general idea is if we can recognise that a page matches all of these criteria then we would like to use that appropriately in search ranking.
I don’t know what the approach would be where there are some things that are OK and some things that are not perfectly OK, like how that would balance out.”
How Can I Measure Core Website Vitals?
Core Web Vitals can be measured in 6 ways including:
- Search Console. The Core Web Vitals report identifies any issues that need addressing based on real-world data.
- PageSpeed Insights. Core Web Vitals are annotated with a blue ribbon.
- New metrics added are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
- Chrome DevTools. This helps you to find and fix visual instability issues on a page that can contribute towards CLS.
- Chrome UX Report. This is a public database of real user experience data on millions of websites.
- Web Vitals Extension. This measures the three Core Web Vitals in real-time.
Contact Whitefish Marketing today for all of your web optimisation and SEO ranking needs.
