What is your biggest pain when you click a website?
The common one being the waiting period for a page to load, especially on mobile. In addition to this, my biggest frustration is the continuous page shuffle as the page loads. And every time you are on the page, it refreshes automatically. A common practice followed by publications. My guess is that it is connected with the ads running on the page.
Google has identified all the above problems and clubbed them under Core Web Vitals which it announced last year, exactly during this time. Since Google wants not only a faster web but a better web.
“Through both internal studies and industry research, users show they prefer sites with a great page experience. We will introduce a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals for page experience to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.”
Google also stated that it will introduce the page experience metrics into its ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility.
Along with the Core Web Vitals, Google is considering factors like mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines, to provide a holistic picture of the page experience.
The rollout is finally going to happen from this month as announced by Google.
Core Web Vitals score from iProspect
iProspect is already tracking the Core Web Vitals score for every industry on its dashboard. At the moment it is doing for 1500 sites across 15 industries. Surprisingly Nonprofit industry has failed to find a place as of now.
“23% of all sites will benefit from Google's Core Web Vitals update.”
The dashboard allows you to enter your domain name to see if your site will benefit from a Google ranking boost from mid-June. Your scores are based on the experience of your actual site visitors over the past 28 days.
Or you can find your site’s Core Web Vitals data in the “enhancements” section of your Google Search Console account.
Basics of Core Web Vitals
Before we understand the study let’s just understand the quick basics of the Core Web Vitals. The three important factors are:
Largest Contentful Paint(LCP): LCP is the time it takes for your largest piece of content to become visible on the page – whether that’s text, an image, a banner, or a video.
To get a score of ‘Good’ for LCP, the largest visible piece of content needs to have fully loaded within 2.5 seconds.
You can check your LCP score using Google PageSpeed Insights.
How do you improve the LCP score of your site -
Remove all third party scripts and use bare minimum plugins. For example, WordPress has been popular because of the plug and play features. However, this feature also brings down the speed drastically so see what all you can hardcode.
Go for better cloud hosting and framework. This really works if you lot of daily images to be uploaded.
Optimise your images and enable Lazy Loading of images.
Finally, check your Google Page Insights to remove or optimise larger elements that are bringing your page speed.
First Input Delay(FID): First Input Delay (FID) is the reaction time of your page, after a visitor tries to do something – whether that’s tapping a button, a link, or typing in a text box.
To get a score of ‘Good’ for FID, your pages should react to user events within 100 milliseconds.
Pages that don’t have a login there FID won’t figure, but for pages for a login page, sign up page, or other pages where users need to quickly click on something, it is big deal. What matters is how quickly you can start typing in your login details.
How do you improve FID score - Again remove or minimise the unwanted Java Scripts, remove the unwanted third party scripts and use a browser cache that will allow your page to load faster.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the visual stability of a page as it renders on-screen. It calculates the distance that all items on the page move – often that’s because of images, pop-ups, or ad banners.
In other words: if elements on your page move around as the page loads, then you’ve got a high CLS. Which is bad. Instead, you want your page elements to be fairly stable as it loads up.
To get a score of ‘Good’ for CLS, pages should maintain a CLS score of 0.1 or less.
How do you improve CLS score - Make sure ads elements have a reserved space, set size attribute dimensions for any media and Add new UI elements below the fold.
Backlinko has a comprehensive guide on Core Web Vitals and how to improve the score that you don’t want to miss. Even Moz does.
Search Engine Journal has a massive guide for Google’s Core Web Vital. The guide covers all that listed below and much more:
How to measure the three Core Web Vitals metrics – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Google’s insights into how Core Web Vitals work – and how they impact rankings.
In-depth exploration and explanation of LCP, FID, and CLS.
The tools that technical SEO professionals can use to measure and report on CWV performance.
Backlinko’s study on Core Web Vitals
“53.77% of sites had a good Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score. 46.23% of sites had “poor” or “needs improvement” LCP ratings,” says the study done by Backlinko to understand more about Core Web Vitals.
To do so the team analysed 208,085 web pages and established benchmarks for Cumulative Layout Shift, First Input Delay, and Largest Contentful Paint.
The first task was to understand how websites faired on the LCP score. In simple terms, LCP measures how long it takes a page to load its visible content.
Here’s how the sites that we analyzed fared:
Even the FID ratings looked good and so did the CLS score.
However, the interesting section of the study was finding how LCP correlated to user behaviour.
To analyze Core Web Vitals and their impact on UX, the study decided to look at three UX metrics designed to represent user behavior on web pages:
Bounce rate (% of users leaving a website’s page upon visiting it)
Page depth per session (how many pages users see before leaving the website)
Time on the website (how much time users spend on a website in a single session)
The study believed that: if a website’s Core Web Vitals are improved, it will positively affect UX metrics.
In other words, a site with “good” Core Web Vitals will have a lower bounce rate, longer sessions, and higher page views. Fortunately, in addition to Search Console data, this data set also contained UX metrics from Google Analytics.
Overall, the study didn’t see any significant correlation between the Core Web Vitals, bounce rate, time on site, or page views.
However, make sure your website is ready for the Google update with Core Web Vitals since it is going to impact your web rankings.
P.S. Do read my thoughts on the 2021 Digital Experience Benchmark report by Contentsquare to understand how page experience is playing a big role under factors like Time to first byte, Largest Contentful Paint, and Total Blocking Time.