We’re looking ahead at Google’s upcoming page experience update and making sure all our web design and SEO clients are in a strong position for when this is released. The update, which Google announced earlier in 2020, will make new page experience metrics a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.
A core component of this update is Google’s web vitals metrics. Core Web Vitals provide a technical measure of page experience and are now included in many Google tools. The objective of Core Web Vitals is to provide website owners, SEO agencies and web designers with tangible data to benchmark, test and improve user experience.
Core Web Vitals currently includes three aspects: loading, interactivity and visual stability. These areas have a corresponding metric which tracks the performance of the site for each area.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – good experiences should be under 2.5 seconds
- First Input Delay (FID) – good experiences should be less than 0.1 seconds
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – good experiences should be less than 0.1
These new measures are becoming increasingly important across both SEO and web design. It’s likely that Google will begin to expand this set of metrics after launching the page experience update later this year.
Core Web Vitals DevTools
Web vitals now have their own reporting lane within the latest version of Google Chrome DevTools. This is an extremely useful resource for developers working to improve core web vitals scores as part of an SEO or web design project. The feature will flag up timings that have passed or failed, according to Google’s benchmarks, highlighting the importance of these metrics for developers.
To access the new Web Vitals reporting in Chrome DevTools, you can find a checkbox under the Performance tab. Enabling this feature will help identify issues resulting in poor performance by lining up activities with offending web vitals scores – for example, render blocking scripts or heavier website assets.
If you’re concerned your site isn’t ready for Google’s upcoming page experience update or would like to learn more about our SEO and web design services, please get in touch.