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What are Core Web Vitals?

Vital factors for overall user experience on a website.

March 14, 2021

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a set of measurement tools that Google uses to evaluate the quality and performance of webpages. Core Web Vitals include three specific performance measurements: page speed and data requests, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift (CLS).

Remember this is what it really is:

  • Loading (Largest Contentful Paint known as LCP)
  • Interactivity (First Input Delay known as FID)
  • Visual Stability (Cumulative Layout Shift known as CLS)
Side note: Contentful is not really a word in English. But hey, that is how they define it. 

Core Web Vitals are all the metrics that apply directly to the page and the components that make up that page. Each Core Web Vital points to a different aspect of the page user experience. There are several web vital areas that cover performance in the following ways: page speed, page content, page interaction, page layout, page linkability, and page content delivery. All the metrics that we use can be broken down in these areas. Let's look at them one by one.

Performance factor: Loading

The first thing that can be gleaned from a speed report is the page speed. In this case, we're talking about the time it takes for the page to load. While it might sound odd that the userspace of the page plays such a role in the speed report, this is a crucial piece to understand as there are many elements that go into page speed.

The largest contentful paint component is the time it takes to load the page. It's important to understand that this is not a simple numbers game, but rather a balancing act between many different technical indicators and real-world usage.

Performance factor: Interactivity

The second-biggest indicator out of the speed report is the interactivity of the page. The interactivity percentage is a ratio of the total number of interactions vs. total number of unique visits. Core Web Vitals here includes page interactions that require users to click, move, or jump.

The largest elements on a page are typically the title, H-tags, headings, and Meta tags. In addition to those, the size, width, and height can also vary depending on the page. The appearance of your site can be changed by CSS but keep in mind that changes on mobile devices may not be displayed correctly in your browser. To make sure that your users do not experience problems with navigating through your page, I highly recommend that you include a mobile friendly design.

Interactivity is the second big feature that makes up a complete Core Web Vitals measurement. This is actually the foundation of your entire speed metric, which measures how fast your pages load and navigate. There are many different ways to collect this kind of data, but we highly recommend that you gather it all in one place. The load and navigate metrics are available for most popular search engines, such as Google and Bing. If you want to gather this kind of information in a different way, you can use two different kinds of sources: the regular web page and mobile web page. Keep in mind that collecting this kind of information for different ways is an important part of measuring your website's performance.

Performance factor: Visual Stability

The third component is also another important indicator of your website's performance. In the past, Google has provided its Page Speed Indicator tool, which can show you what CPU time is used by your page. However, Google has recently started displaying only raw CPU time, so you need to learn more about the other components that are related to this. To get a complete overview on how Google recommends updating all the pages for optimal page speed, you should visit the Google website called "speed-tests" or go to Google and type in "speed-test."

 

The last and final component is performance metrics, which are commonly referred to as user experience metrics. It has been said that the user experience is much more important than the technical ones, because human beings do not care much about technical details and only concentrate on things that matter to them. 

 

This means that the key to measuring user experience is to focus on what the visitors feel when they use the website, what their expectations are, what they find difficult and what they don't. This is actually the same idea behind "what are core web vitals?"

 

You can see that Google, like other search engines, uses many different components to measure your SEO efforts. However, the measurement of those components can give you a clue about what you need to do to improve page speed, search console response time and user experience. 

 

By combining these three components and analyzing them, you will be able to determine where improvements should be made. If you take all these points into consideration, you will be able to determine what our core web vitals for your SEO campaign. Once you have determined the main issue, you can start making changes that will benefit your business in the long run.

Learn More

What is Usability? - Simply put, usability is what human visitors of your site interact in terms of their use of your website or app.

Is SVG Good for SEO? - SVG image format is really good for SEO. Learn more about it in this blog post.

What are Content Experiences? - It is basically a fusion of content and user experience. You can say it is a robust way to do content marketing in 2021.