What you need to know about Google's Core Web Vitals

Google’s Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics deemed essential to delivering a good user experience, now have their own report in Search Console. Google considers these metrics “critical” to all web experiences and is now providing site owners with an easy way to measure them.

Measuring Core Web Vitals in Search Console

Google is rolling out a Core Web Vitals report in Search Console which will replace the old Speed report. Replacing the Speed report with the Core Web Vitals report goes to show how Google’s thinking has evolved regarding user experience.

What are the Core Web Vitals?

In order to provide a good user experience, according to Google, a site needs to meet certain expectations for loading, interactivity, and visual stability.

These three metrics represent the 2020 Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint: measures perceived load speed and mark the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded: An ideal speed is 2.5 seconds or faster.
• First Input Delay: measures responsiveness and quantifies the experience users feel when trying to first interact with the page: An ideal measurement is less than 100 seconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: measures visual stability and quantifies the amount of unexpected layout shift of visible page content: An ideal measurement is less than 0.1.

For each of the above metrics, to ensure you're hitting the recommended target for most of your users, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop devices.

Improving Core Web Vitals

Non-technical users may need the assistance of a developer to fix specific issues.

If that’s the case, then you can download the and of the reports and send them to the person assisting you.

Google says some of the most common page fixes should include:

• Reduce your page size to less than 500KB.
• Limit the number of page resources to 50.
• Consider using AMP.

Tip: If you want to get more organic traffic or improve your search results rankings; consider doing a proper site audit and improve your LCP, FID, and CLS. Remember Google is evolving and we will have to adapt to the change and respond positively towards it.

Always remember to maintain a score above 75. Happy Optimizing!