What Are Core Web Vitals, And Why Should You Care About Them?
When we are busy building an effective SEO, SMM, and SMO strategy to rank in the search engine and earn a profit, Google shocks the marketers and business owners by issuing new algorithms for ranking purposes.
Till now, Google considers 200+ factors to dedicate a website’s rank. This Core Web Vitals is also one among them issued by Google.
One big question that lies in front of us is what is it and why does it matter?
That’s what this blog is all about. It will tell you everything about it and evaluate and optimise the website for Core Web Vitals.
Keep reading to know more.
Table of Contents
What Are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals (CWV) from Google is a page-experience metric. The main aim of it is to deliver a great user experience (UX) to the visitors on the web.
To improve the UX of a website, everyone follows HTTPS, mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, and lack of interstitial pop-ups, but still, Google senses that something is missing.
Now finally, they have found the missing piece and announced Core Web Vitals.
Through it, Google measures the on-page user experience like – How fast the web page is loading? How quickly does it interact? How fast it stabilises? Which has become a critical part of the google website ranking factor.
So, to measure it, CWV is made of three crucial metrics, and they count the loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a website.
Let’s look at them elaborately:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures the loading rate of your webpage from the user’s point of view.
In other words, the time taken to display all the essential elements of your webpage to the user is LCP.
Apart from other page speed metrics like First Contextual paint and TTFB – LCP differs a bit.
It’s because LCP focuses on the user’s experience and the other metrics doesn’t not.
This difference matters a lot.
Nowadays, to grab the visitors’ attention and quickly grasp the information, most websites use images and video.
In such cases, the size and quality of the image or video matters.
Because if both of them are low, then the loading rate will also be low, but if it is high, it can frustrate the user with a high loading rate.
Besides, the visitor may even exit your site and choose another to purchase or collect information, which in turn increases the site’s bounce rate.
Google knows it. So, to give their users a great experience and to reduce the bounce rate, they’re now paying close attention to the loading speed.
The benchmark now Google sets for LCP is 2.5 seconds. Within this time frame, the visitor must be able to see every detail of the webpage.
First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures the interactive time rate of the website.
Let me explain it with an example:
Imagine that you’re logging in to your social media profile. After filing the user id and password, the moment you hit the sign-in button – if it doesn’t log in, what will you do?
Don’t you keep clicking it repeatedly until you get logged in?
That’s the First Input Delay.
The time taken for the website to process the request after the user has made their interaction is the first input delay.
So, to remove the burden and provide a great response to users at high speed, the FID metrics must range below 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures the visual stability of the webpage.
Let me walk you through it with an example:
Imagine that you’re travelling and your scrolling news feed.
At the time, you find an exciting topic and click it, but at the very last second an image loads up and pushes the news down, which ends you up in clicking some other news.
How will you feel?
Annoyed right?
You have to return back and search for the same exciting news.
Because of the visual content’s loading rate and stability, as a user, you will be feeling a terrible experience.
The content of the webpage bumps because of the delayed loading time of the larger element is CLS. The benchmark of google for CLS is less than 0.1.
Why Should You Care About Them?
Google wants their users to get relevant information, and at the same time, it wishes to provide a great user experience.
With these metrics, Google can quickly identify how their users are experiencing and how they feel.
This means, Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor will undoubtedly impact your ranking position.
Even though you create a great piece of content for your target audience but weighs low on the three metrics, you’ll rank low, and likely your traffic will decrease.
It happens in all cases – when you’re running a PPC campaign, if the loading hassle still persists, it will affect the user’s experience, and your invested money will be wasted.
Even people won’t share your content on social media if the loading rate is really high.
That’s the reason why you must care about the Web Vitals.
How to Know Your Website's Core Web Vitals?
Now, you must be clear about what CWV is and why it matters.
Here are a few tools that will help you measure and analyse your website’s CWV.
Google Search Console
Google search console and PageSpeed insights are free tools provided by Google. There you can collect all the necessary details to optimise Core Web Vitals websites.
All you have to do is – Login search console, to your left you can see “Core Web Vitals” – click it.
After that, it will direct you to a report on both mobile and desktop.
There you can see a list of poor, good and need improvement URLs.
With the report, you can analyse your website’s CWV.
The number of URLs on the poor section is really critical where you have to keep your eyes wide open and improve the website.
The need improvement section too also requires your attention but prioritise the poor section first.
If your web page’s URLs are placed under a good section, then you no need to worry. Your site is in perfect condition.
That’s it – with the report, you can analyse all the three metrics and figure out which URLs require immediate attention to optimise.
PageSpeed Insights
However, there is another insight provider – PageSpeed Insights.
This tool will help you breakdown the complete analysis of your homepage in your report, and moreover, it will aid you by providing improvement recommendations.
The only drawback of this tool is unlike Google Search Console, you can scrutinise only one page at a time.
How To Improve Your Core Web Vitals?
Once you have the complete report in hand, it’s time to optimise the website. Here are the things you must do to optimise websites for Core Web Vitals.
How To Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)?
- Remove any unnecessary third-party code: Third-party code you include will decrease your page speed, as while loading, the code will be running on many aspects.
- Upgrade your web hosting: If you are using a shared hosting service, you must keep your self aware of the shared hosting limitation and if you are hitting your limit then you may consider upgrading.
Upgrading to VPS Hosting will be recommended course of action. - Get rid of more prominent page elements: Use PageSpeed insights to know if the page contains any elements that slow down its loading rate.
- Reduce CSS: High number of CSS, too, can slow down the LCP.
How To Improve First Input Delay (FID)?
- Reduce JavaScript: Remove codes that are unnecessary for the users.
- Use Cache: A browser cache will load the page quickly.
How To Improve Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)?
- Pay attention to size attributes for all media: The dimension you set for the media will not allow it to bump content while loading.
- Ensure ads have separate places: If you don’t dedicate space for ads, they can appear on any part of the webpage.
Conclusion
Every single ranking factor counts!
You can’t ignore any of it, in that case, the Core Web Vitals too are really important in the ranking factor.
The SEO and Google algorithms are tightly bonded. You can’t remove any one of them.
Core Web Vital provided by Google mainly focuses on the user’s on-page experience.
When you analyse and optimise your website according to the three metrics of CWV, no one can stop you from ranking at the top of the search engine.
Shashi kant Pandidhar
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