Research,  SEO

Core Web Vitals: Preparing for the Google Update

May 1, 2021 /

Google announced last November that they would be rolling out the page experience ranking change in 2021. Recently, they’ve announced the change will roll out in mid-June this year.

Core Web Vitals are a big part of this new change. I’ve worked with a couple of different websites to help them improve their Core Web Vitals. Here’s some helpful info I’ve found.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are metrics that represent different parts of the user experience. They include:

image via Google

Largest Contentful Pain (LCP): This measures the loading performance of a page. For a good experience, Google states LCP needs to occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

First Input Delay (FID): This measures interactivity — pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures visual stability, and pages should have a CLS of .1 or less.

You can find these in the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console for your property.

How to prepare for the Core Web Vitals update

It’s not clear what impact the ranking change will have, but it’s important to prepare for it.

  • The first thing you should do is take stock of how your website is currently performing in terms of Core Web Vitals. The report will show you the Poor and Need Improvement URLs.
  • Next, I recommend prioritizing the URLs based on traffic to better understand where you may want to begin your efforts. Also, noting the difficulty of the improvements can help you get to low hanging fruit first, which may have a large impact.
  • You can use Lighthouse in Chrome Dev Tools to measure Core Web Vitals and get recommendations for improvements. You can also find Lighthouse in PageSpeed Insights. PageSpeed Insights can also help you take a look at competitors to see how you generally compare.
    • It is important to note that the Core Web Vitals report takes into account real user data via the Chrome User Experience Report (“field data”), while Lighthouse uses “lab data”.
    • There are some good suggestions here for improving your performance.

  • You can also pull Core Web Vitals into Google Analytics to get further insight into how each page is performing. This is especially helpful if you have many URLs that appear as “similar URLs” in the Core Web Vitals report where it’s more difficult to see the performance of each URL.
  • Finally, you can start validation of your changes by clicking “start tracking” in the Core Web Vitals report. Google notes this is a 28-day tracking session, but I’ve seen it completed in less time, even a couple weeks. There is a traffic threshold that needs to be hit in order for there to be enough information. Your validation can pass or fail, so make sure to check back and read more details in the report.

What is the Page Experience report in Search Console?

The Page Experience Report is new in Google Search Console. It displays how many “good” URLs you have and the impressions associated with them. It also notes failing URLs across mobile usability and Core Web Vitals. On it’s own it’s not extremely helpful, and you’ll need to click into the other reports to get more details.