Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is a benchmark or a set of metrics described by Google to evaluate your website’s performance overtime. The purpose of keeping considering and following core web vitals metrics are to increase user interface and reduce bounce rate to keep SEO the same. The most important three metrics to keep the performance good are; Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. Since more and more people now use phones to access, mobile performance and overall performance can impact ranking in search engines. Following these metrics can help avoid any SEO related damages. For future, Google has planned a new important way of ranking consisting their new page experience signals, web vitals, and their existing search signals for May 2021
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
A part of Google’s core web vitals, Largest Contentful Paint or LCP defines the measures of your website’s performance that can help you raise up your ranking. While other metrics evaluate similar aspects of your site pages, they can be confusing about the loading time. LCP focuses on page related content like paragraphs, headings, audios, videos, images, etc. As a core web vitals metric, LCP follows the KISS principle to determine your loading time i.e. how long it takes to load your heaviest page, hence giving you accurate results. Just as the name says, this metric picks up the largest web page and evaluates it’s load time. One reason why you need to optimize and have your website’s content loaded in the best way because LCP can detect if it is slow and lower your ranking. A good example of this can be an advertisement or an image in a new website. Since advertisements take a while to load, they can have a negative impact. To achieve a high LCP score, you need to optimize your web’s speed otherwise it can leave a bad impact on both; Google and your audience. Visitors do not like to wait and if your web content takes long to load, it can bore them. Since a lot of people now use mobile phones to access the same huge content, speed can be a matter of problem. Hence, these metrics are more strict on mobile than a computer or a laptop. So to achieve high ranking, keep a close eye on metrics specially LCP specifically considering mobile and web core vitals.
First Input Delay (FID)
First Input Delay or FID is a metric that measures the time between when user interaction first starts and when your website responds to it. If it takes too long to get a response for the action, your visitors can get annoyed. So to avoid that, you need to keep your FID score at 100 MS and less. What happens if you have a bad FID score? Well, let’s talk about a badly structured online shopping website. You add an item to the cart but the response is delayed and you have to click several times to for it to add the item. This happens because the FID score of that website is too high. Since this metric measures the first action taken, this can easily irritate the visitors without even going further. The possible errors could be poor coding or maybe the server but regardless, this is not good for your business. A high FID score means losing a valuable potential customer as well as failing to capture new customers.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS is a metric that measures user experience events by providing your site is reliable, meaning that your website is accurate and does not shuffle around things randomly. This means that meanwhile the page is loading, something important (like font sizes shifting from large or small or images from small to large) moves around impacting you. For instance while your visitor is on your page a text from one picture shifts to another unexpectedly causing the visitor to lose attention while reading. Another reason could be bad UX decisions, leading to the visitor losing interest in your content due to random changes or pop-ups, lowering your ranking. Random things moving around your web page can cause your visitor to call it annoying or “sluggy” and they would immediately leave your site. So whenever a huge change is noticed, CLS can slow down the site because the browser has to keep up with what you see. So a healthy CLS score must be low at around 0.1 or less to ensure stability.
Summary
Along with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are the top 3 essential metrics, however other metrics such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), Time to Interactive (TTI), Total Blocking Time (TBT), and your Speed Index (SI) can also boost up your ranking, user experience and SEO performance. Take a tour of our website to know what we can do for you. Our team can guide you to implement solutions and use different metrics to increase website productivity and SEO performance. We serve to help accelerate your business growth. Call us for a free analysis, and a detailed conversation with a professional to discuss your SEO needs and performance!