Google is Postponing the Core Web Vitals Update. New Page Experience Report in Search Console

The ranking algorithm updates in June, while the new report surfers the limitations of its ancestors

Core Web Vitals have been the talk of the town for SEOs over the past year. As many have speculated the algorithm's update might not be as impactful for websites as first imagined, Google released an update on the roll-out date.

In a blog post at the Search Central blog, Google announced that the Core Web Vitals will be gradually rolled out starting in mid-June to end-of-August.

But why?… and most importantly — why now?

Making Sense of Google’s Core Web Vitals date change announcement

According to the announcement, three key things can be highlighted:

• Core Web Vitals are not the end-all to better rankings — ‘page experience remains one of many factors our systems take into account’
• User Experience continues being the focus of Google — ‘this update is designed to highlight pages that offer great user experiences’
• Wide-spread panic is largely unjustified — ‘sites generally should not expect drastic changes’
• SEOs and site owners should continue (or start) making refinements — ‘ …make refinements to your website with page experience in mind’

There are a few reasons that this update is happening now.

Google is still figuring this one out, evidently. We can validate this by looking at the recent interviews of John Mueller, discussing the metric.

I can name three important updates that have happened over the past week, which are enough to shake a core update schedule:

• Changes in how one of the core metrics is calculated (see Evolving the CLS metric)
• Insight into potential poor scores being caused by users in countries with slow internet (see Roger Montti’s article on SEJ)
• the introduction of the Page Experience report in the Google Search Console

As per the last item on this list, if you read my article on making Core Web Vitals actionable, you’d perhaps already know what I think. Nonetheless, let’s go over the new report.

Introducing the Page Experience Report

The Page Experience Report is undoubtedly an improvement from the previous Core Web Vitals section available on the Search Console.

Here is what is good about it

• It mulls down insights into beautiful charts
• It highlights important aspects of user experience (e.g. mobile, security)

Here is what is great about it

• It enables progress-tracking through its fix validation feature — an amazing improvement and well-serving for testing purposes
• It puts the data in the context of impressions, which, let’s admit — is what site owners like to talk about the most.

Unfortunately, however, there are a couple of fatal flaws that still make the report fall short of perfect to me.

Here are the report’s limitations

1. It provides an ultimate number of affected pages and a sample list of URLs

This approach furthers the Search Console approach of working with sample data for user protection but hinders site owners’ ability to fully diagnose issues and work at scale.

As the GSC team states in an info-box in the report:

Each example URL represents a group of URLs with the same issue and status and similar content and resources.

This is often insufficient in implementing a site-wide fix.

What is the alternative?

Use different tools to audit Core Web Vitals. There are two types of data you can use — field and lab, as well as several different testing tools to get to the insights you need before you start fixing.

For large sites, absolutely use Screaming Frog and the Pagespeed Insights API as it enables site-wide insights, and collects both types of data.

You can use this dashboard to connect the data and visualize it, alongside recommendations for affecting the performance scores.

2. It is not well-adapted to large sites, as it offers only page-by-page recommendations.

Once you click on a URL, which has an issue, the report shows you a list of examples, or so-called ‘Similar URLs’. You can click on details for each of them, where you have the option to explore each one in the Pagespeed insights URL inspection tool.

Full disclosure — I absolutely love this tool, as you might have already noticed; I even included it in my Core Web Vitals Data Studio dashboard. It’s great for exploring URL’s one by one. But how great is this for a site of a thousand pages? How about a few hundred thousand? Not so great anymore.

The issue I have with the report is that you can only see a sample list of URLs with the issue, a sample of the ones related to each URL selected, and no recommendations on how to affect this performance.

What is the alternative?

By using Screaming Frog’s spider you can get the same data you see in the URL testing ground, through the API.

This enables getting recommendations on potential savings for each and every one of the pages on your site, which you can then view and filter accordingly, in order to prioritize your optimization workload.

Through using the provided CWV dashboard, you can also use a custom filter to filter the URLs, based on the sections of your site, such as the blog pages, product pages, and other sections. This can enable faster task allocation if there are different teams for the different sections of the site.

The Takeaway

Google is postponing the Core Web Vitals update roll-out to June. The roll-out will happen gradually until the end of August.

There are many reasons why Google is postponing the update, but mostly it appears the team is still adjusting the metrics and providing tools for enabling site owners to adapt better.

One such tool is the Page Experience report, introduced by the Search Console team, which is great for small-scale diagnosis but unsuited for large sites.

The Page Experience report is great because it:

• Offers good insights into beautiful chars
• highlights important aspects of user experience (e.g. mobile, security)
• Enables progress-tracking through its fix validation feature
• Puts the data in the context of impressions

What makes the Page Experience report fall flat to the needs of large site owners?

• It provides a scorecard of affected pages and a sample list of URLs, restricting site-wide issue visibility
• It fails to provide a site- or section-wide overview of the main issues, as it offers only page-by-page recommendations.