Google search console updated their one term ‘speed experimental’ with the ‘core web vitals’ in May 2020. The search console has updated it under the enhancement tab, to show the data that matter for the website’s URLs speed.
The core web vitals report shows the status of the website’s URLs performance, divided into device types. In this report, the device type either may be desktop or mobile. The ultimate goal for the Core Web Vitals report is to fix the poor URLs problems and enhance the user experience on your website.
If your website or property is new on the search console, you might see a page showing “no data available”. Sometimes you might see the data available for the desktop but no data for the mobile devices, or vice versa.
It is because of the Chrome UX (CrUX) report did not find enough information for those types of devices (Generally happens with new websites).
As the name suggests it provides the core data that is important for the user experience on the web (website). It uses three main metrics to describe the report, Largest contentful paint (LCP), First input delay (FID), and Cumulative layout shift (CLS).
What is Core Web Vitals
Core web vitals in the google search console replaced the speed experimental report to fix the poor user experience. It shows the data taken from the CrUX report. CrUX report gathers the relevant information of the actual users visiting the website URL.
The Core Web Vitals describes the CrUX report related to the performance times of the specific URL visitors. It categorized the status of the URL for the users or visitors and shows the report in search console property.
There are three categories for two devices (mobile and desktop):
- Poor URLs
- URLs need improvement
- Good URLs
The reports are showing in the graphs with the color-coded. The poor URLs are in the red-colored, the URLs that need improvements are in the orange color, whereas the good URLs are green.
What affects the Core Web Vitals
According to the google search console, three metrics are the most important for improving the user experience on any website.
- Largest contentful paint (LCP)
- First input delay (FID)
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS)
Here in this article, we have mentioned how these three metrics are useful for improving the user experience and how it can affect your website.
Largest contentful paint (LCP)
The largest contentful paint is the time taken for the largest content visible on the website. Here the largest content may be a video, image with high pixel quality, or large text block content.
For speed improvement and better user experience, Google has decided the following boundaries:
|
|
Good |
Need Improvement |
Poor |
|
LCP |
<2.5 sec |
≤4 sec |
>4 sec |
First input delay (FID)
The first input delay is the time taken between when users click on the link (URL) to when the browser responds. This is the time when a page becomes interactive to the user. So FID plays a vital role in improving the website speed and user experience.
Though it does not take too much time. But the first input delay can improve the bounce rate and hence website performance.
The boundaries for FID are given in the below table:
|
|
Good |
Need Improvement |
Poor |
|
FID |
<100 ms |
≤300 ms |
>300 ms |
Cumulative layout shift (CLS)
The cumulative layout shift shows the data for how much a page element has shifted during loading. It has a region from 0 to 1. Zero means no shifting, whereas one means most shifting. When the elements of any page shift, it may create a bad user experience.
The boundaries for CLS are given in the below table:
|
|
Good |
Need Improvement |
Poor |
|
CLS |
<0.1 |
≤0.25 |
>0.25 |
How to improve the Core Web Vital
You can usually see a drastic change in your website traffic, either it may be increase or decrease. The core web vitals are dealt with the user experience and are showing the data of the URLs that can affect the website traffic.
By improving the above three metrics you can improve user experience and direct the performance of your website.
URLs with the good categories are prioritized by Google. One bad URL can bring your website from a Good position category to a Need improvement category and it will make organic traffic drop in your website.
So, to improve the core web vital first you need to fix the issues related to the poor URLs. Some of the issues are totally technical and need the assistance of a developer, while some other issues can be sorted out easily.
For non-technical users, here we have mentioned some tips to improve the core web vitals:
- Reduce the page size, better if it is less than 500 kb
- Use low pixel quality images
- Use AMP on your website
- Limit the number of page resources, better if it 50 or less for the mobile device.
- Delete irrelevant comments.
- Remove non-useful block articles, videos, or images.
- Use more text blocks on the front screen of the page.
The LCP, FID, and CLS issues can be tracked on the start tracking issue details page. If the issues are fixed, they will be updated in the google search console soon.
Ultimately we can improve the Core Web Vital report by working the website speed. Though it has replaced the name speed experimental to Core Web Vital. But the core web vitals is also related to the speed improvement data of the website.
Here we can check the speed-related data of our website: PageSpeed Insights
- Also Read:- How to write SEO friendly articles
References:- What is SEO
