Digitalisering
22. april 2021
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals is a new update to Google’s algorithm that focuses on quality signals related to your website. It is primarily website speed that now plays a bigger role in Google’s assessment of how your website should rank for your keywords.
There are 3 metrics that Google looks at:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
All three are signals for the experience of visiting your website. LCP and FID indicate your website’s speed, and together they account for 95% of the three. CLS is about whether your website changes after it has loaded.
The update was rolled out during the second half of 2021.
In other words, core web vitals is simply part of Google’s algorithm that determines which websites should rank for what.
It is not a NEW metric in the algorithm. The update coming in May is simply Google tightening the screws in this direction.
Speed has always been important for on-page SEO, and Google has now given that update a name: Core Web Vitals. 😉
More of the same
There is absolutely NOTHING new under the sun with the update to Google’s algorithm in May (Core Web Vitals).
Core Web Vitals is more of the same we have seen in recent years. And about 95% of the update concerns website speed, and the remaining 5% goes to CLS—more on that later.
Below is how Core Web Vitals is calculated. Note the weighting on the right. In other words: it is all about website speed.
The 3 parameters
Below is a description of the three parameters referred to when talking about Core Web Vitals. Note that the first two are about website speed. These are the two that Google has weighted at 95%.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – Measures loading speed. To provide a good user experience, your LCP should be under 2.5 seconds.
- First Input Delay (FID) – Measures how quickly users can interact with the website. To provide a good user experience, your FID should be under 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Measures how stable the design is. To provide a good user experience, your CLS should be below 0.1.
What does it mean for you?
No one knows the full impact of Core Web Vitals yet, but it looks like Google is now starting to penalize websites that score “BAD” on speed. Those in “Improve” will likely feel like they are working slightly against the wind.
Google has been gearing up for a long time to do something truly serious about speed in its algorithm. And we believe Core Web Vitals is the beginning of speed playing a significant role. So if your website looks like this in the Google PageSpeed test, you need to work on website speed:
If you are in the “green,” however, Core Web Vitals will not make any difference for you.
What can you do from here
Go and scan your website at: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Then sing a song while you wait for the scan to finish (talking about page speed here, Google 😉).
Read this post, where we have given you 8 concrete things that should be done on your website in relation to Core Web Vitals.
The result will look something like the image below. Here you can read the three highlighted parameters:
Google has made it easy with colour-coding of its messages, and anything green should simply be left alone.
If you are in the red, you need to make some changes where your website is failing. Most often, it is within:
- How large files need to be loaded (Largest Contentful Paint) – Images and video files
- First Input Delay (FID) – server setup and codebase
Half of you reading this and running a scan will see that “you are all good.” The other half should roll up your sleeves. Core Web Vitals is an important part of your technical SEO; if you want to read about the other aspects, we have written a blog post about technical SEO.
