Google Core Web Vitals: Everything You Need to Know But Were Afraid to Ask!
User-experience has always been an essential part of Google ranking algorithms. It affects how your site performs in the search engine result pages (SERPs) and determines your chances of getting to the #1 spot.
Google recently decided to take that to the next level by introducing Core Web Vitals. Which are performance metrics intended to improve user experience and SERP rankings.
You’ll learn in this guide everything you need to know about Google Core Web Vitals. We’ll explain why they’re important and show you how to measure and optimize them for maximum results.
Ready?
Let’s dive in.
What are Google Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a set of user-centered factors recently launched by Google to assess page experience. Each of them reflects a specific aspect of the user experience — including loading, interactivity, and stability.
They are all after the same objective:
How soon can users start consuming content while browsing your web pages?
The three factors are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) deals with loading performance. It measures how fast the largest element of your page appears on the screen. That includes plain text, images, videos, or any other form of content.
First Input Delay (FID) measures your website’s interactivity to user inputs. Which could be mouse-clicks or keypresses (such as a tap on a button or filling a login form.) The faster the browser reacts, the more responsive your page is.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a new metric that assesses how stuff moves around the page while it loads. It deals with visual stability and how long it takes for your page elements to stop moving.
We’ll cover each of these metrics in more detail in the rest of this guide.
But first, let us understand how these metrics are better than simply measuring page speed and what makes them important to your website.
What Makes Google Core Web Vitals Important?
Quality users deserve better content. And vice versa.
That has been Google’s vision from the first day they launched the search engine. This is why they included user-experience as an integral part of 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录.
Google made sure their users got the best results anyone could find online. But they also wanted their high-quality content to get as many visitors as possible.
Read our full guide to learn more about how and why user experience affects 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录 .
Accurate results require more metrics than just keyword density and backlinks.
Google must find new ways to assess user satisfaction and understand what the customer wants. It needs to understand how users are interacting with the top results. And it must know if those results are the best the algorithm can serve.
Search engines are just beginning to understand user experience and measure it accurately. They’re always after discovering the next metric that can help them serve their users best.
That explains why Google launched the Core Web Vitals project.
Core Web Vitals Google Search Central
The sure thing is:
Google will continue to improve on the ranking algorithm it has today. And it will surely introduce more complex ranking signals in the future.
Do Core Web Vitals Affect 皇冠crown娱乐官网登录?
There are over 200 ranking factors Google uses to rank websites today. So it’s unlikely this one update will have a huge effect on how your site performs in the SERPs.
However…
Google will continue to develop and launch new ranking signals and the impact will become more significant as time goes by. Consequently, if you don’t follow Google’s advice after these updates, you’ll miss excellent opportunities to improve.
Even worse:
Your competitors will surely comply with these ranking systems changes, which puts them at an advantage to rank over you.
But don’t worry — we have great news:
Google has given webmasters a year to start working on their sites and improve them.
Even if you’re reading this after May 2021, you can still optimize your Core Web Vitals and boost your rankings.
How to Measure Core Web Vitals?
Now that you’re certain of the importance of optimizing your Core Web Vitals scores, it’s time to show you how to fix them. But before you can do that, you first need to learn how to measure them.
You can use many tools to test your Core Web Vitals however, the results between the tools don’t always align due to different testing server locations or algorithms.
And the thing is…
Google only considers PageSpeed Insights results when assessing Core Web Vitals scores. That’s why we always recommend using only