What is Core Web Vitals? Explained in Simple Terms.
If you are a site owner, then Core Web Vital is the best thing you'll learn today.
Core Web Vital is a set of field metrics which measures your website user experience based on real-world data collected via Chrome User Experience Report (Chrome UX Report)
While Google considers Website speed as a ranking factor, it became mandatory to learn and optimize websites based on Google Intent.
This Core Web Vitals helps you to determine how good your sites are performing for real global users.
There are three metrics by which Core Web Vitals calculates whether your site is “good” or “Needs Improvement” or “Poor”
The metrics are
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) simply initial load time measures the page load speed by calculating the time when the largest content element in the page gets visible. In simple terms, LCP monitors how fast the initial texts on your page gets visible for users.
First Input Delay (FID) simply interaction time measures how fast the page is getting responsive and enables users to make the first interaction on the page.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) simply stable time measures the time when the site becomes stable and loads completely.
Here is the breakdown on how the “Good” “Needs Improvement” “Poor” is calculated.
perf | Good | Poor |
|---|---|---|
Largest Contentful Paint | ≤2500ms | >4000ms |
First Input Delay | ≤100ms | >300ms |
Cumulative Layout Shift | ≤0.1 | >0.25 |
To measure the overall performance, Core Web Vitals considers the 75th percentile of page loads. We don't want to talk much on this since if you the overall site speed, then you will “Good” score on Google Search Console.
Highlights of Core Web Vitals
Google claims Core Web Vitals are introduced to offers the High- Quality user experience.
Also, Google says existing posts can be easily optimized for Core Web Vitals by fixing the three core metrics LCP, FID, and CLS.
Tools to Check Core Web Vitals
1.Search Console
If you are a site owner, check the new update on Google Search Console under Enhancement menu. Google will display the value of all URLs.
For Marketers, Search Console displaying the URLs as “Good” should be the ultimate aim since this is the way we can understand how Google determines our URL.
While the two below metrics can be manipulated slightly when we run the report multiple time but it won't be that much useful as the overall site visitors experience must be good.
2. Chrome Dev Tool
Load your site and click on Inspect Element. Navigate to Audits menu and you will get the latest option to analyze Core Web Vitals all from your chrome browser.
Click on Generate Report, Chrome does the job. I ran the audit for this post and here is the report.
Our site hosted on Liquid Web and the performance is good with 96 scores and there are few more areas that need to be improved.
3. Google PageSpeed Insights
Go to Google PageSpeed page, enter the URL, and get recommendations. The tool says this page needs to improve the Speed Index.
28th May 2020 Update: Now, Google PageSpeed Insights integrates the Core Web Vitals measurement. Check the below-updated image.
You can check this page score directly here. Our desktop scores are perfect like above while our mobile scores needs some improvement. Probably,I'll write a new post enlightening the optimization techniques.
Concluding
With our digital agency, we are rebuilding our sites based on new Google Core Web Vitals and check out us for more optimization guides in the near future.
