Core Web Vitals – why should you check them out on your site?
A sizable update to Google’s algorithm is coming in 2021, which will emphasize sites’ fulfillment of core metrics, or Core Web Vitals. This new ranking factor is expected to have the same importance as at least installing an SSL certificate on a site, or good responsiveness.
Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor from 2021 – what exactly is it?
Core Web Vitals (a.k.a. Core Web Metrics) are concerned with real-time user experience and primarily refer to a site’s speed, loading time and responsiveness (scaling on mobile devices).
The information that this will be a new ranking factor is important in order to prepare sites for this important update. Improving the value of Core Web Vitals therefore directly affects a website ‘ s positioning and User Experience.
The basic indicators consist of:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), which is the time required for the largest element on the page to load. This time should be a maximum of 2.5 seconds.
- FID (First Input Delay), which is the time counted from entering the URL of the page, after which the user can perform the first action on the page. This time should be a maximum of 100 milliseconds.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), which is the sum of all shifts of elements on the page during loading (layout shift). All shifts should happen in less than 0.1 seconds.
When calculating these indicators, the content of the entire domain is taken into account. It is not enough just to optimize a few pages – the entire site must be improved to benefit from the upcoming upgrade.
How do I check my site’s Web Core Vitals metrics?
Core Web Vitals results for a site can be checked on 6 different tools offered by Google:
- Google Search Console
- PageSpeed Insights
- Lighthouse
- Chrome DevTools
- Chrome UX Report
- Web Vitals plugin
It should be noted that the values of Core Web Vitals can vary depending on what device you check the site on, what kind of Internet connection you have, or at least how many plug-ins you have installed. Therefore, it’s best to use a couple of tools to check Core Web Vitals values and do it in incognito mode.
Google Search Console CLS
To check the value of CLS in Google Search Console, you need to go to the basic web indicators report. Importantly here only indexed URLs are taken into account. This is important because if a website has been freshly launched with indexing enabled, it will be necessary to take steps with its entry into the index.
