Google provides feedback to website owners so they can optimise their website. Recently Google started rolling out ‘Core Web Vitals’, a specific set of data signals that you can use to track your website’s performance and improve your users’ experience.
How much Core Web Vitals will affect your ranking is unknown. But considering that Core Web Vitals have a direct bearing on your users’ experience, you should definitely give them some consideration.
Currently Core Web Vitals consist of:
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
You’ve probably experienced visiting a website and clicking only to find that the screen has jumped and you’ve ended up clicking something else.
This is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – the measure of visual stability. The website elements load at a different rate. The website appears to jump around as it loads, creating a poor user experience. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less.
Ensuring elements on the page have a set height can usually correct this. The browser then knows how much space the element will take up before it loads.
First Input Delay (FID)
Poor First Input Delay (FID) makes the user wait for more of the page to load before they can begin interacting.
FID measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
Javascript and the use of third-party code can increase the time the browser takes to load. Improving the management of these assets can reduce your FID.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) relates to performance. Think of a slow loading website.
LCP marks the point in time when the main content loads. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
LCP can be affected by poor hosting, inefficient plugins, large images, poorly delivered CSS and javascript.
Ways to measure Core Web Vitals
If you have a site with high traffic, data collects in Google Search Console under Core Web Vitals. You may not have enough real world data for this report to run. Noting that there can be a 28 day lag for data to be collected.
