What are Core Web Vitals? Is LCP, FID and CLS a Ranking Factor?
Google has already announced the biggest algorithm update aimed at Core Web Vitals. This is an important sign that Core Web Vitals can make a big difference in the status of organic search results.
Core Web Vitals is an important topic that is currently gaining traction in the SEO industry. And as digital marketers, we may be hearing this term many times a day. Core Web Vitals is Google’s initiative to provide a unified guide to the quality signals needed to provide a great web user experience.
Over the years, Google has provided many tools for measuring and reporting website performance. Some developers are familiar with using these tools, but others find it difficult to keep up with the bunch of tools and metrics.
Research shows that most people don’t know about Core Web Vitals and why they are important to their business or website.
What are Core Web Vitals?
A core Web Vitals feature of Google is also known as the acronym CWV, is three-page speed metrics that affect the experience when a website visitor visits every page of your site. This is provided as a score similar to the Google Ads quality score.
According to Google, Core Web Vitals’ metrics change over time but currently fall into three categories:
Loading:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time it takes for most of the first screen of a page to appear.
- To provide a great user experience, you should run LCP within 2.5 seconds of loading the page.
Interaction:
- The First Input Delay (FID) measures the time it takes a visitor to take action.
- Bad experiences with FID include being unable to click another page, add a product to the cart, or enter a query in the site’s search bar for a period of time.
- The FID page should be less than 100ms to provide a good user experience.
Visual stability:
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the vertical displacement of a page when loading interactive elements, images, ads, and other elements.
- Visitors to a site where the link you’re trying to click suddenly moves two inches across the screen or you see the text you’re reading from the screen will worsen your CLS experience.
- The CLS of the page should be kept below 0.1 to provide a good user experience.
These three main components of the core web vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift) are used to measure website load, interactivity, and visual stability.
Why are core web vitals metrics important?
After all, Google is a company whose business objective is to show users the best search results. We use various metrics to measure a good user experience and incorporate them into ranking algorithms to provide the best web page experience for users.
The key features of the core web vitals are important as they focus specifically on the user experience of the web page. If your webpage fails Google testing, it will be more difficult to rank your webpage and therefore your business may lose traffic and visibility on Google search engines.
What should you do now?
If you’re unsure about the potential impact of integrating Core Web Vitals into Google’s algorithms, ask SetBlue for a free SEO consultation. We can evaluate your website and the competition to see how urgent it is to solve the problems.
