Are you ready for Google’s Core Web Vitals?

In about one week Google plans to launch the latest update, which is directly related to the Page Experience and is called the Web Core Vitals.

Google’s updates often have a significant impact on websites and online businesses, as they often lead to a shift in search rankings, sometimes hardly affecting the websites and in some cases, even losing up to 70% or 80% of total positions in SERP and website traffic.

In the case of the Page Experience update, Google will aim to reward websites that offer visitors a good user experience.

What are Google’s Core Web Vitals?

The three main Core Web Vitals considered as the Google ranking factors are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

This might sound confusing, but all three elements are essentially related to how quickly a site loads and how soon a visitor can start interacting with a page, and together with Mobile Friendly, Safe Browsing, HTTPS and lack of Intrusive Interstitials are some of the most important factors in User Experience.

So, let’s see what they mean and how to fix them, ensuring your website will not be affected by them.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint?is the metric that measures the time a website takes to show the user the?largest?content on the screen, complete and ready for interaction. Google defines that this metric considers only the content above the page's fold, meaning everything that appears without scrolling.

A fast LCP quickly provides people with the information they’re requesting to ensure a helpful experience. Slow loading times and high LCP scores may produce a frustrating experience when seeking information.

Google considers a good user experience to be an LCP score of 2.5 seconds or less. A poor user experience is defined by an LCP score of 4.0 seconds or more. Any LCP score between 2.5 seconds and 4.0 seconds is a user experience that needs improvement.

The most common loading issues for websites include things like slow server response times, large file sizes like JS and images, or long load times for critical resources (outdated, too huge, and non-optimized JS and CSS). Fixing these issues would in many cases solve the problem and grow the page loading speed significantly.

First Input Delay (FID)

First Input Delay (FID) measures the interactivity time between user action on a website and a browser response time. A fast FID lets people interact with a website faster, growing their satisfaction with the website and lowering the bounce rate.

Slow interactivity times and high FID scores may prevent people from completing actions like purchasing, signing in, or clicking on buttons, and the bounce rate of your website would grow to 80 or even 90%, where you would be losing a huge amount of clients and revenue.

Google considers a good user experience to be an FID score of 100 ms (milliseconds) or less than a tenth of a second. A poor user experience is defined by an FID score of 300 milliseconds or more than a third of a second. Any FID score between 100 milliseconds and 300 milliseconds is a user experience that needs improvement.

The most common interactivity issues for the website may include things like heavy JavaScript execution, use of slow third-party scripts and fonts, or server-side rendered content.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability by analyzing content layout shifts in a viewport.

High CLS scores may indicate sudden shifts of content, which can lead to poor user experiences such as clicking on the wrong thing because the content the user was aiming to click on has moved.

Google considers a good user experience to be a CLS score of 0.1 or less. A poor user experience is defined by a CLS score of 0.25 or more. Any CLS score between 0.1 and 0.25 is a user experience that needs improvement.

The most common visual stability issues for small business websites may include things like specifying image dimensions, assigning static space for ads or inserting dynamic content above existing content, having text rotators on the page with different text lengths, and other elements that may shift content during the loading and when the page is loaded.

What does Google’s Core Web Vitals mean for your website?

Providing a quality user experience to website visitors is important for the long-term success of any website. Whether you own a small or big business, Core Web Vitals is an opportunity to improve customer experience and perhaps gain a boost in search engine rankings.

Those actions affect not only your rankings in Search Engines but also user behavior on your website and can mean the difference between keeping the visitors on your website or giving them a reason to go to your competitor's website to order the same services or?products.

Core Web Vitals may seem very technical, but the guidance behind improving page experience should enable a small business to focus on the metrics that matter most. While those metrics will?evolve?as search engines gain more confidence in the data, Core Web Vitals is a starting place to improve user experience.

How to improve the website and pass Core Web Vitals?

The fastest, most elegant cheaper way is to hire a web developer who knows what to do and fix all issues for yourself. It would save you a lot of time and headaches fixing everything on your own.

On the other side, if you or your in-house team know how to do it, you can do it by following some basic steps:

1.?????Use a lab tool like Google PageSpeed Insights tool to identify the exact situation and gain knowledge about what has to be done,

2.?????Optimize the database interaction on your website, in case you are using the database because a slow database load can lower your score significantly,

3.?????Enable the compression of resources on your website, because in some cases compressed resources can save up to 90% of the time in page loading,

4.?????Ensure that the cached policy on the website is set properly and all static resources (HTML, JS, CSS, JPG, GIF…) are loaded from the cache, not from the server each time,

5.?????Try to avoid third-party services, fonts, and scripts whenever you can, and try to move all third-party scripts to your server and load them internally,

6.?????Utilize the CDN, because it can raise the page load speed significantly, allowing you to serve more visitors in less time and with a less server load,

7.?????Check if your website is using intense Java scripts and clean the unneeded, if possible,

8.?????Resize and compress your images properly, or serve them through some of the next-gen formats. You can save up to 50% of the loading time with this action,

9.?????Eliminate render-blocking resources on your website, moving them from above the fold to below the fold,

10.?Preload all fonts on your website and defer all JavaScript you have on your website,

11.?Reduce unused CSS and minify used CSS files and code,

12.?Minimize main-thread work on your website,

13.?Reduce the JavaScript execution time,

14.?Avoid chaining critical requests, and so on.

All of this would require playing with updates to the pages and testing until you get a satisfying result but will help you solve your issue and raise your page speed.

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