With Core Web Vitals, Google aims to increase web performance. Why? Since the majority of Google’s operations are web-based, slow websites and web applications drive users to turn back to native apps.
Your placement in Google search result is determined by the keywords, how you employ those keywords on your page, and how popular your page is based on the quantity and quality of links from other websites all affect where you appear in Google search results. Beginning in August 2021, Google will start attempting to evaluate pages based on performance.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals provides a measurable way to assess user experience to help you focus on the most critical improvements. The changes to your vitals may not increase revenues, but your users will be happier and more loyal.
Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) is three performance metrics that assess real-world user experience:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Loading performance
- First Input Delay (FID): Interactivity performance
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Visual stability performance
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Largest Contentful Paint measures loading performance. In essence, how rapidly does usable material appear on the website?
Pages where the Largest Contentful Paint has finished loading in less than 2.5 seconds are considered good (green). Poor pages (red) are those that take more than 4.0 seconds to load.
First Input Delay (FID): First Input Delay measures the responsiveness of your page. In core, how quickly does it respond to user activities such as clicking, tapping, and scrolling? The FID metric is calculated as the time between user interaction and the browser processing their request.
Pages with an FID time of 100 milliseconds or less are considered good (green). Pages exceeding 300 milliseconds are considered poor (red).
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures the page’s visual stability. In essence, does page content move or jump unexpectedly, especially during the initial load?
Pages sporting a CLS score of 0.1 or less are considered good (green). Pages that exceed 0.25 are considered poor (red).