How Core Web Vitals Affect Your Website SEO in 2021

Viken Patel -

In May 2021 Google announced Core Web Vitals will become ranking signals that will also combine existing UX-related signals. User experience is a vital part of building the best site, and now, it will play an even bigger role in helping build awesome sites for customers.

All this is powered by new metrics, with at the center: the Core Web Vitals. Of all the possible metrics, Google now identifies three so-called Core Web Vitals. These are the focal points for Google in the coming year. Every year, Google might add or change these metrics as they evaluate them over a longer time.

What are Core Web Vitals? –

Core Web Vitals are the subcategory of Web Vitals that apply to all web pages. They must be measured by all site owners. As they are surfaced across all Google tools. Each Core Web Vitals represents a distinct facet of the user experience, it is measurable in the field and reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome.

As Google puts it:

“Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. They measure dimensions of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads (so you don’t accidentally tap that button when it shifts under your finger – how annoying!)”

Core Web Vitals were introduced earlier this month intended to measure how users experience the speed, interactivity, and visual stability of a page.

The Three Tiers Page Experience Are:

  • Loading performance
  • Interactivity
  • Visual stability

What are the three core web vitals?

To measure the essential aspects of user experience, Google takes into account three corresponding metrics, namely:

  • LCP, Largest Contentful Paint: It measures the time taken by the largest piece of content to appear on the screen. It can be anything, an image or a block of text. A good score gives users the feeling that the site loads fast. A slow site leads to foiling.
  • FID, or First Input Delay: It measures the site’s reaction to the first interaction. A good grade here gives the user a sense that a site is quick to react to input and, therefore, responsive. Slow site leads to frustration.
  • CLS, or Cumulative Layout Shift: This accounts for the visual stability of the site. In short, does stuff move around on the screen while it is loading — and how often does that happen? It is more frustrating than trying to click a button when a slow-loading ad appears in that spot.

Why is it important for your website? –

Google intends to help more site owners build pages that users enjoy visiting.

As Google regulates that a page is yielding a high-quality user experience, following its page experience signal, then the page will rank higher in search results.

However, content relevance is still substantially significant when we talk about rankings. A page with content that’s highly relevant to a query could rank well even if it had a poor page experience signal.

The opposite is also true, as Google states:

“A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where multiple pages have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.”

As Google mentions, a page experience signal is a tie-breaker of sorts. Implying that if there are two pages both providing excellent content, the one with the stronger page experience signal will rank higher in search results.

Don’t hassle around on optimizing for page experience that the actual content on the page starts to suffer. Great content will outrank a great page experience.

Measuring core web vitals for your website –

As of yet, there is no specific tool for evaluating page experience as a whole.

Although it is possible to measure the individual components that go into creating the page experience signal.

We talk about measuring Core Web Vitals, SEOs and site owners tend to use a variety of Google’s tools such as:

  • Search Console
  • PageSpeed Insights
  • Lighthouse
  • Chrome DevTools
  • Chrome UX report
  • And more

Well just for your information, a plugin for the Chrome browser will also be available soon. It will help to quickly evaluate the Core Web Vitals of any page you’re looking at. Google is also working with third parties to bring Core Web Vitals to other tools.

Measuring other user experience signals

Readout how SEOs and site owners measure the other type of user experience signals:

  • Mobile-friendliness: Using Google’s mobile-friendly test.
  • Safe-browsing: Checking the Security Issues report in Search Console for any issues with safe browsing.
  • HTTPS: If a page is served over a secure HTTPS connection, then it will display a lock icon in the browser address bar.
  • Intrusive interstitial guidelines: This one is a bit trickier. You can check out for guides available to understand what counts as an intrusive interstitial.

How to optimize core web vitals for your website?

Web Vitals and Core Web Vitals signify the finest available signals developers have today. They use it to measure the quality of experience across the web. However, these signals are not perfect and future improvements or additions should be expected.

The Core Web Vitals are related to all web pages and included across relevant Google tools. Changes to these metrics tend to have a wide-reaching impact. For instance, developers should expect the definitions and thresholds of the Core Web Vitals to be stable, and updates to have prior notice and a predictable, annual cadence.

The other Web Vitals are often context or tool-specific and maybe more experimental than the Core Web Vitals. As such, their definitions and thresholds may change with greater frequency.

Conclusion

Core Web Vitals have a significant impact on the SERP. You ought not ignore them. of course! you won’t be penalized for not meeting the new page experience criteria, you won’t be rewarded either. If you pass the Core Web Vitals assessment you may receive a ranking boost.

In short, the technology will continue to evolve as adoption increases. Future aims to enfold more user-friendly interfaces. They will increase efficiency and bring a better end-user experience. You must try to improve Core Web Vitals so that your users have a better experience.You can take this as increased opportunities for your website.

It is high time that every businessman understands the potential of existing technology and embraces all emerging trends. Your website does not have to suffer, just jump onto proactive measures. Logicwind has enabled website development while maintaining higher page speed standards.

Switch to Logicwind today! No more juggling with page speeds, we have got your back. Our passionate drive for consistent technological innovation has helped and will continue to help many. Contact us today.