Google’s ranking factors and algorithm used to be mostly semantic. However, the search engine started giving after its recent updates.
After applying various user experience criteria, such as page speed and ease of use on mobile devices, Google announced the Core Web Vitals in May 2020 to provide a unified guide to website quality indicators.
This guide will explain the necessary information about Core Web Vitals, including the definition and tools to measure your website scores. We will also show how to use one of the tools and discuss other metrics that support the three main Web Vitals.
doWhat are Core Web Vitals?
Google’s Core Web Vitals are standardized metrics for measuring user experience. The Core Web Vitals represent three elements that affect how users interact with a website: loading speed, user interaction, and visual stability.
Core Web Vitals help site owners evaluate their sites and identify areas for improvement by displaying specific benchmark scores.
Top Core Web Vitals Metrics
Google mentions the Core Web Vitals metrics, depending on what users see as a good experience on the page. Today, site owners and developers need to measure the following three Core Web Vitals metrics.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Page load time
The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) checks the rendering time of the main content of a page when it starts to load. The main content is usually the largest image or block of text in the viewport, the visible area of a web page on a user’s device.
LCP data is mainly composed of the following elements:
- picture elements
- Block level text
- video banner images
- Background images
Site owners should ensure that the Core Web Vital score is 2.5 seconds or less to offer a good user experience and achieve an ideal site speed.
Although late-loading content is often larger than the other elements on the page, this is not always the case. Preload the largest content It helps to get a better LCP score and improve the experience.
The most common factors for a poor LCP score are slow server response times, client-side rendering, and large images.
First Input Delay (FID): Interactivity of the page
the First Input Delay (FID) measures input latency, i.e. the time it takes for a site to respond to user input. This includes keystrokes, taps and button clicks, links, and video or audio on a page.
Other interactions, such as zooming and scrolling, are not included as they have other performance limitations. The FID focuses on the aspect of response in the , while scrolling and zooming relate to the element of animation.
An ideal score for this Core Web Vital is 100 milliseconds or less.
Maintaining good user interaction is essential, as delays can be frustrating for people, reducing the quality of the user experience
Important! Users may experience different delays, depending on their hardware and network conditions. For example, loading sites on a fast Wi-Fi connection will be different than on a 3G network.
Cumulative Layout Shift: Page Visual Experience
the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability and checks for unexpected layout scrolling on the page.
Unexpected movement occurs when elements such as text, buttons, and images are pushed down while the page is still loading. This often leads to frustration because the user can click something else when the elements are moving.
Pages must have a CLS score of 0.1 or less.
Previously, Google measured this Core Web Vitals metric by calculating the sum of individual layout scroll scores across the page.
The system since 2021. Groups one or more individual layout changes that occur in a maximum of five seconds with a one-second interval between windows.
The most common drivers of design changes are images, widgets, and dimensionless banner ads.
How important are the Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are part of the page experience indicators that include mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, and the absence of intrusive interstitials.
As of August 2021, page experience metrics have become an important one for mobile devices. Google even plans to complete this positioning system for computers in March 2022.
The same Google page experience update also shows that the search engine continues to prioritize pages with the most relevant content. However, the page experience can increase visibility if multiple pages have similar relevance levels.
Therefore, we can conclude that Core Web Vitals play an important role in search engine ranking factors.
Core Web Vitals also help ensure your site delivers fast and stable performance, which can increase conversion and engagement rates.
In fact, more than 50% of mobile users leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load. An additional one to three seconds in loading time can .
Tools to measure Core Web Vitals
Since Core Web Vitals have become a ranking signal, web experts need to monitor their scores and make sure the metrics are working well to rank high in Google search results.
Three Google tools to measure Core Web Vitals are:
- PageSpeed Insights: reports Core Web Vitals data on mobile and desktop for the last 28 days. It also shows an analysis to check the loading time of your website. To use this tool, go to , enter a URL and press the button Analyze.
- light house: It is an automated and open source tool to monitor the performance of the web. Lighthouse has several metrics that PageSpeed Insights doesn’t, like accessibility and SEO. Two methods to use this tool are to install the extension and right-click on a specific page you want to analyze -> To inspect -> light house.
- Search Console– Displays performance metrics in the Top Web Metrics report in the section Experience. Unlike Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights, this tool allows you to check all the web pages on your site together.
PCLIDFCLSPageSpeed InsightsYes Yes Yeslight houseYes Yes YesSearch ConsoleYes Yes Yes
Numbers always accurately reflect the real-world experience with any Google tool, thanks to the Chrome User Experience Report.
The report collects data from anonymous Google Chrome users who have opted to sync their browsing history. It helps website owners quickly assess the performance of their pages without having to manually connect their Google Analytics tools.
Google applies the of all pageviews to rank the overall performance. This means that Google will give the site or page a good score if at least 75% of page views meet the Good threshold for each Core Web Vital.
Keep in mind that a page’s score won’t influence how other pages perform on each metric. For example, a home page may have a lower score than a product page.
recommended reading
Read our tutorial on how to improve your site’s ranking.
How to Measure Core Web Vitals
Measuring Core Web Vitals is easy with the tools above. They will show you the problems and give you practical suggestions for improvement.
This section will walk you through a Core Web Vitals test from ‘s Tutorials page using PageSpeed Insights.
Enter the page you want to rate and click Analyze. The tool will display score bars for various core metrics and whether or not the web page passes the Core Web Vitals assessment.
click on expand view to see more detailed scores.
Change the analysis to Mobile either Desk to see the scores for each device.
Scroll down to see the exact scores for each metric. Here, all the numbers are green, indicating that the Tutorials page has good Core Web Vitals scores.
The numbers will be red if the tool sees the page as performing poorly.
under the section of metrics, Opportunities Y Diagnostics PageSpeed Insights suggestions for improving page performance are displayed.
For example, if the tool detects a large image, it will suggest uploading it through the media library to avoid using full-size photos. The table below shows the photos that can be optimized and their potential savings.
To filter the suggestions, click on a specific metric above the section of opportunities. Press the button View tree diagram to view JavaScript data grouped hierarchically.
Other performance metrics to check
In addition to the above three metrics, website owners also need to consider more factors to deliver a great user experience. Including First Contentful Paint (FCP), Total Blocking Time (TBT), and Time to Interactive (TTI).
Although you can find these new metrics in some of the Core Web Vitals tools, they are not part of it. They help capture more of the page experience and help diagnose a specific problem.
Speed Index (SI)
The Speed Index (SI) measures the time it takes for parts to appear within the viewport. To calculate your SI, an analytics tool will capture a video of a page loading in the browser and calculate the process frame by frame.
A good SI score is 3.4 seconds or less. The quality of your user experience is better when the content at the top of the page appears faster.
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
Content First Paint (FCP) calculates how long the browser displays any content from the Document Object Model (DOM). Includes text, images, and non-white canvases.
Note that FCP is different from LCP, which measures the rendering time of the largest content on a page. For…
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