Is Your Website Ready for Google's Core Web Vitals Update?

Google continues to find new ways to improve website quality and user experience. However, user experience is hard to measure and most speed metrics only give part of the picture so Google have developed new ways to measure user experience - Core Web Vitals.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals (CWV) is a new set of factors that will measure how the pages of your website are performing. The aim is to deliver a great web experience to users by focusing on speed, responsiveness and visually stable web pages.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This simply means the time it takes for the biggest piece of content of your web page to load. 

First Input Inlay (FID) is a real-world data metric from actual users measuring how long it takes for the browser to respond the first time a user clicks on your page

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much unexpected shifting of the various elements is happening while the page is loading. The lesser the amount of unexpected shifting, the better.

To improve your core web vitals, focus on the Mobile-First approach.

Google has combined Core Web Vitals with Page Experience metricssafe browsing, intrusive interstitial guidelines, HTTPS security and most importantly, mobile friendliness. Mobile-first has more weight compared to other metrics because mobile internet usage has surpassed desktop since 2016.

This means you should design or develop your website with mobile in mind instead of designing it for desktop and scaling it down for mobile after. 

How do I check my site’s Core Web Vitals?

Want to track how well your site is doing? There are several ways to check out your site’s core web vitals. 

Page Speed Insights. Page Speed Insights help measure  your site’s core web vitals in both lab data sections and field data.

Lighthouse. Lighthouse measures SEO performance and page speed, but now, the upgraded version also comes with a new feature that measures core web vitals.

Chrome UX Report. Chrome UX Report or CRUX measures core web vitals based on real-world data like users’ browsing history, usage statistics, etcetera.

Web Vitals Extension. You can find your core web vitals by installing an extension from the Chrome plugin.  

Google Search Console. You can log in to your Google Search Console account and look for the core web vital report/metric under the enhancement section. The report will help evaluate how well the pages of your entire site is doing.

We check and report on our clients Search Console messages including CWV every month.

Is your website ready for Google’s Core Web Vitals update? Do you want expert eyes to regularly check for errors on your CWV scores? Want to push your scores into the green?Get in touch with us at [email protected]. Or request a website review from https://tunedwp.com/performance/