Your site’s core web vitals metrics must be better than your competitors. If they’re not, even if your content is better, it won’t rank as high.
Fractions of seconds can make a major difference. Installing anything that slows down your site can cost you most of your income.
As you can imagine, understanding core web vitals and how to improve them is now essential for getting organic search traffic.
Google Core Web Vitals
Google Core Web Vitals were rolled out in May 2020 as part of their website page experience algorithm update.
User experience (UX) is what core web vitals are all about. Google is attempting to accurately measure how your visitor’s user experience affects their behavior.
By focusing on improving your customer’s experience, business income and profitability will increase. At the same time, your core web vitals metrics will improve.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
Google is focusing on measuring actual user experience. They use field data which they call “real world usage data”.
This data is refined down into these three metrics:
1) Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Core Web Vitals LCP measures how long it takes for the largest content including the main image to fully load visually and be ready for interaction. LCP core web vitals can be the biggest challenge to address.
2) First Input Delay (FID)
Core Web Vitals FID measures the responsiveness vs latency between the first action the visitor takes and how long your site takes to respond to it.
3) Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Core Web Vitals CLS measures the visual stability of elements on the page and whether any move from the position they originally displayed in. The ideal score is 0.
Each of these core web vitals metrics must be addressed individually to improve your website.
Core Web Vitals Update
The Google core web vitals update started in May 2020 and was announced as fully implemented between July 12, 2021 and the end of August 2021.
Google has emphasized the importance of Google web core vitals and especially core web vitals scores. They are a known ranking factor that may be minor at first but is likely to grow in importance.
How quickly core web vitals impact your business depends heavily on whether your direct competitors implement improvements before you do.
Core Web Vitals Testing
The place to start testing core web vitals is with the core web vitals report. It is important to note the difference between the real data used by the Google core web vitals test and third party tools.
Because the real data used covers a twenty-eight day period, the effects of any changes you make cannot be seen until after that amount of time elapses.
The best strategy for how to improve core web vitals is to use the official core web vitals score for each metric. Then, identify issues related to each using third party tools.
Make changes and then test core web vitals again in these tools. The tools reflect changes immediately. This makes them essential for improvement strategies.
Once you can get the results you want in the tools, it is probable that you have improved the real world data as well.
At that point, set a reminder to verify real data results after the 28 day time has passed.
Core Web Vitals Tools
These are among the many tools Google favors for improving Google core web vitals scores:
- Google Search Console
- Gtmetrix
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Web Vitals (Chrome Extension)
- Google Lighthouse
- Chrome DevTools
- WebPageTest
- TREO Site Speed
- Dunplab Web Vitals Tester
Core Web Vitals
Addressing the new core web vitals ranking factor increases the likelihood your pages will rank well in the serps.
Use the Core Web Vitals Google Search Console issue groupings to prioritize issues to tackle. Start with those that affect the most pages of your site to generate the fastest improvement.
The quality and speed of your hosting greatly impacts your core web vitals scores. Using excellent, fast hosting, caching, and the best content delivery networks (CDNs) are all essential to improving your site’s performance.
Core web vitals SEO impact will grow over time. Remember that this is a page experience update, so that is what your team needs to focus on.
If your team doesn’t already have a core web vitals tester, you’ll want to assign one. Begin working now to improve your google web core vitals before your competitors do!
