Google always considers providing a good user experience as a priority. So it’s good to make your website user-friendly in addition to search engine-friendly. To further improve user experience Google will add core web vitals in its existing search signals from May 2021.
Core web vitals and existing search signals together will be considered as page experience signals which are going to be another ranking factor.
What is Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals is all about measuring real-world user experience for page loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the webpage. Here you can understand the three metrics which are considered in CWV:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures how quickly a webpage loads.
- LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): This measures how soon you interact with the webpage.
- Web pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures how stable a webpage is while it uploads and while you interact with the page.
- Web pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.
Other Page Experience Signals
There are few other page experience signals which are considered as ranking signals by Google:
- Mobile Friendliness: As the number of mobile users is increasing so Google recommended providing the most relevant and timely results to the mobile users. So from 21 April 2015 Google started considering mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.
- You can leverage the Mobile-Friendly Test to check any webpage of your website.
- If you want to see and fix mobile usability issues of all your website pages then you should use Mobile Usability Report under Google Search Console.
- Safe Browsing: Your website pages should not contain malware or deceptive or phishing content. So your website should not have any downloadables which are bad for the user experience.
- You can leverage Security Issues Report within Google Search Console to see any safe browsing issues on your website.
- Secure Website with HTTPS: Your website should be secured with HTTPS. This protects your website’s data integrity and builds your user’s trust. Google announced HTTPS as a ranking factor on 6 August 2014. The purpose behind this was to make the internet safer for all users worldwide.
- Easily Accessible Pages: Your website should not have any intrusive interstitials like unnecessary popups. This can make it difficult for users to access your webpages. So Google announced, on 10 January 2017, if any webpage where content is not easily accessible to mobile users then it may not rank in search results.
Page Experience or Page Content – Ranking Factors
Page experience signals will impact rankings but your webpage’s content also matters a lot. Google always prefers to rank webpages with good content that matches the search intent. So if your webpages provide a good page experience but have not relevant content as per the user’s search queries. Then your content may not be ranked in Google search results.
How to Measure Core Web Vitals?
You can measure core web vitals for your webpages in 4 easy ways as highlighted below:
1. Google Search Console
You can find the Core Web Vitals report under the Enhancements menu. This report shows the status of your webpages in terms of LCP, FID, and CLS. Status of webpages can be Poor, Needs Improvement, and Good. Priority should be given to the webpages with poor status.
Data for this report comes from Chrome User Experience Report which is actual data from users in the real-world.
2. Page Speed Insights
Page Speed Insights tool can easily measure Core Web Vitals. This tool shows both lab data and field data. But this CWV data is shown based on the field data as this is useful for capturing true, real-world user experience.
3. Lighthouse
Lighthouse tool also measures 3 metrics that are considered in Core Web Vitals. These 3 metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Total Blocking Time (TBT) which correlates with First Input Delay (FID).
4. Measure with web.dev
web.dev, a website for developers, provides an easy way to measure Core Web Vitals through its https://web.dev/measure/ tool. It provides several suggestions to improve with impact details. So you should first implement suggestions with High impact to improve your website’s performance.
