Google Core Web Vitals, How They Affect SEO and What to Do on Your Website

Google is introducing new signals that affect website rankings, combining Core Web Vitals with existing user experience signals to improve the overall evaluation of a website's user experience.

These new ranking signals began development in early 2020 and will start being used in May 2021.

The New "Page Experience" Signal

The upcoming ranking signal will be known as the page experience signal.

The page experience signal includes Core Web Vitals as well as these existing page experience metrics:

• Mobile-friendliness
• Safe browsing
• HTTPS security
• Guidelines on intrusive interstitials

The page experience signal measures how users perceive the experience of interacting with a webpage. Optimizing these factors makes the site more pleasant for users regardless of the browser and helps sites evolve towards users' expectations on mobile devices.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals, introduced in May 2020, are a set of metrics related to speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.

Google has defined these metrics within Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): the time it takes for the main content of a page to load. An ideal LCP value is 2.5 seconds or faster.
• First Input Delay (FID): the time it takes for a page to become interactive. An ideal measure is less than 100 ms.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): the amount of unexpected shifts in position and size of page content elements. An ideal measure is less than 0.1.

Core Web Vitals may evolve in the future, both the set of metrics and their value thresholds.

These metrics are an evolution from previous metrics, such as load time, which did not necessarily correlate with a good or bad experience.

The Page Experience Signal and Ranking

By adding Core Web Vitals as ranking factors and combining them with other user experience signals, Google aims to help more site owners create pages that users enjoy.

If Google determines that a page offers a high-quality user experience based on its page experience signal, it is likely to rank the page higher in search results.

However, content relevance remains significantly important when it comes to ranking. A page with content that is highly relevant to a query might rank well even if it has a poor page experience signal.

The opposite is also true, as Google states:

“A good page experience does not override having excellent and relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages with similar content, the page experience becomes much more important for search visibility."

As Google mentions, a page experience signal is a kind of tiebreaker. This means that if there are two pages offering excellent content, the one with the stronger page experience signal will rank higher in search results.

What to Do on My Website

Should you worry about these metrics? Yes and no. Think of them as a way to assess your website to identify problems and prioritize solutions. Not so much because it will affect your Google ranking but because it impacts the end user.

Great content can, theoretically, outweigh a great page experience. If your site loads quickly and has good content, users will use (and share) it more often. Web Vitals is one more signal that Google will use for ranking, but good web performance will help other signals indirectly.

Evaluating Page Experience

How to Measure Core Web Vitals

When it comes to measuring Core Web Vitals, you can use these tools:

• Search Console
• PageSpeed Insights
• Lighthouse
• Chrome DevTools
• Chrome UX Report

How to Measure Other User Experience Signals

Here are the other signals and how you can measure them:

• Mobile-friendliness: use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test.
• Safe browsing: check the "Security Issues" report in Search Console to see if there are any issues with safe browsing.
• HTTPS: if a page is served over a secure HTTPS connection, a lock icon will appear in the browser's address bar.
• Intrusive interstitial guidelines: reduce modal windows that appear as soon as your page loads.

Core Web Vitals and Perf.reviews

At Perf.reviews, we continue to analyze websites and offer audit services for companies, with a special focus on Web Vitals.

If you think it's time to review your website, contact us.