What Are Google’s New Core Web Vitals?

Having your website optimized for Google is important for ranking high in the search engine results pages. Google came out with new core web vitals as a measuring stick for website performance. Improving these scores will help you improve core web vitals on your website.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The largest contentful paint calculates the average loading time for the main content of a webpage. The main content is both text and media.

LCP determines how quickly the first meaningful content loads on a computer. It’s not so much how fast a web page loads, but how fast main visible content takes to show.

Google core web vitals state that this page content should load in less than 2.5 seconds. Anything longer will receive a low LCP score. When you first get onto a webpage, you want it to show the main content quickly. If it grips too long to load, users might leave.

First Input Delay (FID)

First input delay measures the time from when a user clicks on a command or input icon and the time it takes the page to execute the command.

These are called inputs and can be things like buttons, icons, links or other actionable inputs. The FID score should be 100 milliseconds (ms) or less. Anything longer than 300 ms could hurt your search engine optimization (SEO).

Any third-party code you have on your website can cause longer FID times. Code that can slow down your website includes analytics script or code for third-party ads. You can improve this time by compressing or minimizing CSS files, breaking long java script tasks into shorter tasks or removing unused third-party code.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift measures the visual stability of the website. Have you ever noticed on some sites, when you first load a page, the images, icons, and links move down the page or shift around as the page is loading?

This is visual stability or, in this case, instability. Shifting icons like this can cause users to accidentally click on something that they did not intend to click.

Visual stability affects the user experience, and Google is interested in a positive user experience. Having a good CLS score provides a positive user experience and improves the SEO performance of the website.

Improving Google Web Core Vitals

When you improve core web vitals, you will also improve your business’s bottom line.

According to Contentful, “Some Core Web Vitals can improve without too much work, but others will require more effort. In any case, your buyers will thank you, and Google might reward you with slightly higher rankings. This could make a real crash on your bottom line. Going up one position on the first page in Google will roughly double your traffic for that specific keyword!”

How You Can Measure Core Web Vitals?

You can check your core web vitals on your Google Search Console under Enhancements. Other websites like PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix will also give you scores for each core element.

Improving core web vitals will enhance user experience, SEO performance and help you get ranked higher. All of these improvements will help your bottom line.