If there is one thing that 30 years in the SEO business has taught me, it’s that Google rarely tells you what they are about to change. So it’s generally a good idea to listen and take the appropriate actions when they actually do offer a heads up.
A few years ago, they told people to switch to SSL. Now you’d be hard-pressed to find any non-SSL sites that rank. Google also told people they were switching to a mobile-first indexing approach. Now it’s increasingly harder to find sites with poor mobile experiences that rank well—even if you are searching from a laptop or desktop.
Google recently announced that starting in mid-June 2021, they will be using core web vitals as a ranking signal. If you haven’t already made changes to your site to reflect this, now would be a great time to take it seriously.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a set of user experience metrics. These will likely evolve over time, but Google is currently focused on three specific metrics: loading times, interactivity, and visual stability.
Loading: To be considered a passing score, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
Good: Less than 2.5 seconds
Needs Improvement: 2.5 - 4.0 seconds
Poor: More than 4.0 seconds
Interactivity: To be considered a passing score, pages should have a First Input Delay (FID) of less than 100 milliseconds.
Good: Less than 100 ms
Needs Improvement: 100 - 300 ms
Poor: More than 300 ms
Visual Stability: To be considered a passing score, pages should maintain a Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) of less than 0.1.
Good: Less than 0.1
Needs Improvement: 01. - 0.25
Poor: More than 0.25
Why Are Core Web Vitals Important?
Put simply, Core Web Vitals reflect some of the most critical components required for a quality user experience.
Loading: If pages load too slowly, bounce rates tend to be high, representing a poor user experience. Worse still, pages that are exceptionally slow to load may have an artificially LOW bounce rate, as users leave the page before the page load pixel/script is even fired.
Interactivity: If a user makes an action and the page is slow to respond, the user tends to feel the page is “broken” and leaves without taking further actions. Again, this departure reflects an action taken by a user who is dissatisfied with the experience.
Visual Stability: Although generally not an issue that causes significant bounce rates, visual stability can still strongly affect user satisfaction. This Core Web Vital indicates how much the page blinks and/or shifts as it loads—think of when parts of the page shift around as different ads load. This can make even the best visual design appear broken and unprofessional. You’ve all seen examples of this - the screen flickers or jumps slightly to the side as the page loads.
How Can You Improve Core Web Vitals?
Run a comprehensive audit. For a smaller site, this means looking at each page individually using a tool such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights and identifying the recommendations and opportunities on a page-by-page basis. For larger sites where such an approach is not scalable, we recommend having an agency run the comprehensive audit for you.
Compile the data to identify common issues. For sites larger than a few pages, you are likely to find common or clustered issues that can be solved programmatically or systemically rather than taking a page-by-page approach. For example, there may be a common render-blocking script in use across the site or a page cluster. By applying the appropriate fix site-wide, you may get an incremental improvement across a large number of pages.
Make the appropriate fixes. A properly run audit will itemize the recommended fixes both on an aggregate level (where appropriate) and on a page-by-page level (where required). Taking action against the itemized recommendations will help improve the overall user experience and lead to more users who have a better overall experience.
What Should I Do Next?
As mentioned above, you should definitely start with a comprehensive audit to see where your website pages stand. Need more info? Here’s a quick FAQ PDF to help you understand more details. If your marketing team wants assistance with a website audit, reach out to Fiddlehead at hello@fiddleheadhq.com