What are Core Web Vitals?
With Core Web Vitals, Google introduced three new criteria in May 2021 for measuring the user-friendliness of a website. These metrics are intended to help assess and classify the user experience a website provides. The three main criteria are loading time, interaction time, and the stability of elements on a website.
The metrics are:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): evaluates the time from accessing a webpage until the largest visible element on the page has loaded. This could be an image, video, or simply text. To achieve a good result, the value should be below 2.5 seconds.
- FID (First Input Delay): evaluates the time between a user's first interaction with the webpage and the browser's response to that interaction. This value should be below 100 milliseconds.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): measures the shifting of elements on a webpage during the loading phase (e.g. a slight shift in the position of a button after loading has completed). The score ranges from 0 (no shifting) to 1 (the strongest shift). To achieve a good result, this value should be below 0.1.
However, these three criteria alone are hardly sufficient to provide a comprehensive user experience analysis, which is why Google plans to expand the Core Web Vitals every year. In addition, the three metrics are to be combined with the existing metrics mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines in order to measure page experience.
Impact on Search Rankings
Google emphasizes that, when it comes to the ranking of a website, content will continue to be the more important factor. Thus, websites that offer more relevant content but have a poor user experience will still rank better than websites that provide a good user experience but whose content is less relevant.
The interesting case is when comparing the rankings of two websites that provide similarly relevant content from the same field. In this situation, the website that offers a better user experience should now rank higher.
Evaluating Core Web Vitals
To provide information about a website's Core Web Vitals, Google plans to expand existing tools. These include Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights, for example. In addition, there is a new report in Search Console. This is intended to help developers quickly access relevant information for improving the user-friendliness of a website.
Do you still have questions about this topic? Or do you need help with SEO and online marketing? Then feel free to contact us!
