Google’s Core Web Vitals – Three Things To Enhance The User Experience

A high-quality user experience is vital for the elongated success of any website over the web and Google is constantly updating its algorithms in order to ensure an enhanced user experience. In fact, it has already established nearly 200 ranking factors to secure good quality results. 

The Google search console is recently updated with Core Web Vitals report with the same aim to raise the quality of the results and assure an improved user experience.

This article is aimed at introducing you with a new program named Web Vitals, announced by Google in May 2020, which is an initiative to proffer a united direction for quality flags that are crucial for producing an excellent user experience over the web.

Although the quality of user experience over the web depends upon a number of factors of which few are purely site and content-specific, a primary set of signals called ‘Core Web Vitals’ is crucial for all web experiences. These include the loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability of the page content. 

What are the core web vitals

Core web vitals is nothing but a user-centric metrics estimated by the user’s experience on a specific web page. A poor user experience can cause your page ranking to diminish significantly. Hence, considering these metrics can be really crucial for the success of a web page over the web and gain a good search ranking for the same. The core web vitals are mainly comprised of the following three metrics

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LCP measures loading performance and identifies the period in the page load timeline when the chief content of the page has probably loaded. LCP should take place within 2.5 seconds of the page loading actually begins in order to ensure an excellent user experience.

First Input Delay (FID)

FID estimates interactivity i.e. responsiveness and determine the experience user is likely to feel when attempting to associate with the page for the first time. The pages are required to have an FID of lower than 100 milliseconds to ensure a pleasant user experience.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

CLS measures visual balance. Pages are required to maintain a CLS of lower than 0.1 to ensure a satisfying user experience. 

Among these, the above two are speed metrics as we all understand. The CLS is pertaining to the page jumping at the time of page load that can be quite irritating and can contribute towards a bad user experience. The things that may contribute towards producing a high CLS include 

1. The images or videos whose size is not known.
2. Rendering of fonts.
3. The third party adds that change their size dynamically.

Why these metrics are more important as compared to others

Google considers the above-mentioned metrics as the Core Web Vitals over others because 

• they entertain the most important user-centric outcomes, 
• they are estimable, and
• they are having the helpful lab diagnostic metric equivalents.

How to improve core web vitals

As per the advice from Google, fixing everything that is marked as ‘Poor’ should be your first priority and then the issues influencing most of the URLs should be settled on a priority basis.  A non-technical user can take the help of technical people/developers to solve particular problems. However, thinking about utilizing AMP(Accelerated mobile pages), restricting the number of page resources up to 50, and lessening the size of the pages to lower than 500 kb is strongly suggested by Google.

Reading the core web vitals report

The core web vitals report displays the URL performance classified by the status, metric type and the URL groups (the set of similar web pages) as shown in the following picture

You can see an Overview tab that allows you to toggle between ‘Poor’, ‘Needs improvement’, and ‘Good’ tabs. You can check the page performance numbers for mobile as well as desktop by clicking on ‘Open Report’. The single rows given in the table can be clicked to view the details about the URL groups impacted by a particular issue. 

The process is quite alike to operating other reports in the search console. This is so because the core web vitals reports work in the same way other reports work.

Relation between page rankings and core web vitals

The core web vitals mentioned above are going to play a significant role in the search rankings of a specific web page/pages. By embracing Core Web Vitals as ranking factors, and blending them with different user experience signals, Google endeavors to assist site owners to create pages that users appreciate touring. If Google discovers that a page is presenting a high-quality user experience, on the basis of its page experience signal, then it is expected to give a higher ranking to the page in search engine result pages. However, the content relationship is still a considerably important factor when we talk about the search ranking of a page. If a web page is having such content that is highly relevant with a search query, it is expected to still rank good even if it is contributing bad page experience signals.

Final Words

The speed and performance of the websites is a never-ending concern as the web becomes more and more feature-rich with each passing day. Although the new web vitals suggested by the Google Chrome team can assist you significantly in delivering a better user experience, it still does not present a full set of metrics that can obtain a perfect user experience over the web. Hence, web vitals are expected to be updated on a consistent basis so that one and all can get the most out of it! Contact us today & improve your website web vitals.