Google has more than 200 ranking factors, but not all carry the same weight. The most important ones are user-centric metrics like page loading speed, mobile-friendliness and the absence of intrusive interstitials. Websites that meet these requirements are loved by Google, and they’re rewarded with organic search visibility above sites that don’t. This is the logic behind the upcoming Google Page Experience update, which will factor in Core Web Vitals as a significant SEO ranking signal.
While there are many ways to improve a website’s performance, the best way to get started is with Google’s free online tool, PageSpeed Insights. The tool provides a report that shows the current state of a webpage across desktop and mobile devices. The results are broken out into Good, Needs Improvement and Poor, with specific recommendations on how to improve each one.
Pagespeed Insights reports on the lab and field performance of a page, and combines them with real-world user data from Chrome’s user experience report. The Core Web Vital set currently includes Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). However, it’s possible that the set of metrics will expand over time, including new ones such as TTFB and First Contentful Paint (FCP).
A fast website offers a smooth experience for visitors. It’s more likely that they’ll engage with the website, and stay longer if it loads quickly. That’s why a good website is the best marketing tool. But if a website is slow, it’s less likely that people will visit it, which hurts its visibility in search engines.
Getting to grips with these Core Web Vitals metrics isn’t easy, especially for non-web developers. They require a deep understanding of how websites are coded and the technical capabilities needed to make changes at the code level.
In order to optimize a website, you need to understand each metric and its impact on the user experience. Here are some tips to help you get up to speed:
LCP measures how long it takes for the largest visible element on a screen to load and render. LCP scores below 2.5 seconds are considered good, while those above four seconds are poor. A page’s speed can be improved by removing any unnecessary elements and reducing the size of existing ones.
FID measures the amount of time it takes for the first input event to be detected by the browser. This could be anything from a button click to the display of a video frame. FID can be sped up by using conditional CSS and avoiding animation.
CLS measures the visual stability of a page as it loads, and looks for any unexpected shifts in layout that might be caused by dynamic or intrusive elements such as pop-ups. It can be sped up by putting priority on loading above-the-fold content and deferring the rest.
The upcoming Google Page Experience update will factor in Core Web Vitals for search rankings, but it’s not yet clear how much of an impact they’ll have. Nevertheless, they’re great measures of the overall user experience and provide concrete, measurable SEO metrics that you can use to optimize your pages.
