Google’s Page Experience Update

Core Web Vitals ... are you prepared?

It's only not long until Google releases its page experience update, otherwise known as Core Web Vitals.

While we don't yet know how this is going to impact local business websites and where they rank on Google, it's certainly something that is on the radar of SEO specialists across the world.

Core web vitals is all about the experience customers have when they are browsing your website.  It's also arguably one of the most significant updates to Google’s algorithm in recent years.

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Read on to find out:

  • What are ‘Core Web Vitals’
  • How you can prepare for this update
  • And which tools can help you find issues on your website

What are Core Web Vitals?

You’re probably already aware when it comes to your website, it’s important to have:

  • Mobile-friendly pages (easy tor view, read and press buttons on a mobile device)
  • HTTPS (which means you have a SSL certificate installed on your website to prevent tampering between your website and your visitors’ internet browsers)
  • A fast loading speed of ideally 3 seconds or less (so your webpages don’t take forever to load)

Core web vitals takes that a step further.

It’s about how your website loads, and what that experience is like for those viewing your website. The goal of the core web vitals update is to improve the overall web browsing experience on mobile and desktop and they are Google’s new standards for evaluating whether a page provides a good user experience.

Core Web Vitals metrics consist of:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the speed at which a page’s main content is loaded. This should occur within 2.5 seconds of landing on a page.
First Input Delay (FID): Measures the speed at which users are able to interact with a page after landing on it. This should occur within 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how often users experience unexpected layout shifts. Pages should maintain a CLS score of less than 0.1

For more detailed information, take a look at the page on Google Developers.

How can you prepare for the Core Web Vitals rollout?

If you have a web developer regularly looking after your website, they should be able to check your website’s scores and implement needed improvements. Getting perfect scores across the board can be quite tough (and potentially costly) and a reasonable goal would be for your scores to improve gradually over time.

It’s also important to understand that while this aspect of your website is becoming more critical (and will do over time), what is more important is the information or ‘content’ on your website and the overall design. If you don’t have adequate useful content to share with your website audience and your website design is not appealing (and therefore customers aren’t enticed to click and read) the page loading experience is going to matter alot less.

 

Tools to help you measure your website’s Core Web Vitals

There are lots of tools available to measure your core web vitals although fixing issues typically requires the expertise of a web developer.

Helpful tools include:

 

If you don’t have a web developer looking after your website and would like some assistance, you can Get in Touch with Maz our Director, to see if we can help.