GOOGLE CORE WEB VITALS SERVICE

What is the Google Core Web Vitals Service, and Why Should You Care?

Great Question!

In the past, web developers have found it challenging to measure how quickly a web page’s primary content loads and is visible to users.

According to the W3C Web Performance Working Group and Google research, a more accurate way to measure when a page’s main content is loaded is to look at when the most significant element was rendered.

The Google Core Web Vitals report educates you on how each of your web pages performs against a set of Google metrics. Google Core Web Vitals results are based on real-world usage data (sometimes called “field data”). You can read more about this initiative on the Google Search Central Blog by clicking this link.

Google uses this Core Web Vitals report and your web page content to decide where your content should “rank” when someone does a Google search. The higher you rank on Google Core Web Vitals, the more likely you will be on Page 1 versus your competition for similar web page content.

The metrics of Google Core Web Vitals will evolve. The current set focuses on three aspects of the user experience: loading (LCP), interactivity (FID), and visual stability (CLS). They include the metrics and their respective thresholds, as shown in the above image:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of the page first starting to load.

• First Input Delay (FID): This measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have an FID of 100 milliseconds or less.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1 or less.