As part of its program to improve user experience (UX), Google announced the launch of Core Web Vitals scheduled for mid-June 2021. Core Web Vitals help website owners improve the user experience in order to offer Internet users quality content. These signals will become crucial to optimize the SEO of each website. In this article, we will review all the essential points concerning these new performance indicators from Google.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals or Essential Web Signals are a set of speed, responsiveness and visual stability indicators that Google has put in place to evaluate the overall user experience of a website. Indeed, the scores obtained will be integrated into the overall user experience score and will thus have an impact on the SEO ranking.
Google has noticed that Internet users do not like websites that have slow loading times. But in addition, users also seek to navigate functional sites while quickly accessing the information they are looking for and with a visual presentation. All these parameters pushed the American giant to create Core Web Vitals, the aim of which is to allow companies to confirm their reputation.
What are the different “Core Web Vitals” signals?
Here are the 3 “Core web Vitals” signals:
- LCP : Largest Contentful Paint (Page performance),
- FID : First Input Delay (Page interactivity) ,
- CLS : Cumulative Layout Ships (Page Stability) .
The Largest Contentful Paint – LCP
LCP measures how quickly primary content (whether an image, article, or description) becomes visible to users. This is because your site may load quickly, but the main content may not appear on screen as quickly as the rest of the page. In this case, speed testing tools will give you a high score, but from the user’s point of view, the page is still slow. This is why Google implemented LCP so that website owners can have a clearer view of user satisfaction with the speed of their sites.
The First Input Delay (FID)
The FID measures the time it takes for your visitor’s browser to process the various interactions with your site on the internet. To put it simply, let’s say a user is on your contact form page. He fills out the form and clicks on the “Send” button. FID measures how quickly your website processes this action. An even simpler example would be the time between when a user clicks on a link and when their browser begins processing the next sequence of events.
Cumulative Layout Ships (CLS)
The CLS is an indicator that measures the time necessary for a site to become visually stable. When a website loads, some elements take longer to load than others. During this time, your website content may continue to move around the screen. For example, if a user reads a paragraph on a mobile device and an embedded video loads above it, all content moves down. This can be very frustrating if a user is trying to complete an action such as adding a product to cart and the button moves down due to the other elements not yet being stable on the page.
Why are Core Web Vitals metrics important?
Core Web Vitals are important because they reflect how your site is performing for users. It’s not just about how fast it loads, but how quickly users can actually use it. If you have an e-commerce site, you can entrust the creation of your e-commerce site to a confirmed service provider in order to optimize your various Core Web Vitals indicators.
According to a recent study, a one-second delay in page load time can result in:
- a 7% loss in conversions,
- an 11% decrease in page views,
- a 16% drop in customer satisfaction.
However, most performance measurement tools don’t really take user experience into account.
A faster website but poor user experience still costs you fewer conversions, fewer page views, and lower customer satisfaction. This can impact your digital communication and your branding. Hence the importance of optimizing Core Web Vitals.
Just like social media presence, user experience is also an important factor in search engine rankings. Google has already announced that from May 2021, the search algorithm update will include page experience as one of the criteria to improve your positioning in Google PageRank.
How to find out your Google Core Web Vitals score?
The easiest way to test your Core Web Vitals score is to use the Page Speed Insights tool . Just enter the URL you want to test and click the Analyze button.
Core Vitals results are displayed in the section titled “Field Data”.
Here is the score you need to pass the Core Web Vitals tests for each item:
- LCP: less than 2.5 seconds,
- FID: less than 100 milliseconds,
- CLS: less than 0.1%.
The Page Speed Insights tool allows you to check the Core Web Vitals score of an individual page. If the page you are checking is the root of your domain name, you can also click the “Show Origin Summary” checkbox. You will thus obtain the score of all the pages served from this origin.
However, to take it a step further, you can also access the Core Web Vitals report in your Google Search Console dashboard.
This report lets you know how many URLs on your website have passed testing, which URLs need improvement, and which pages have a poor score.
Another way to evaluate your Core Web Vitals score is to carry out an SEO audit of your site using a web agency . The latter will offer you a more detailed assessment and specific actions to improve your score.
As user experience is an essential criterion for your natural referencing, but also for your marketing strategy, it is important to optimize your site according to the Core Web Vitals. These new indicators will indeed change the ranking of sites in search results so it is important to pay attention to them now.
