Google Core Web Vitals, what are they, and how can you use them to optimize your WordPress?
Whether you use WordPress or not, you’re going to stumble upon something called Google Core Web Vitals, or Core Web Metrics, at some point.
Google Core Web Vitals are a set of performance and user experience metrics that will become a significant SEO factor over the coming months and years, and you shouldn’t ignore them.
The idea of the Core Web Vitals is to provide a set of uniform criteria to measure the user experience when visiting a website, taking into account the usability and loading speed of all its elements.
This article will see what Google Core Web Vitals are and why they are essential for WordPress users.
WHAT ARE GOOGLE CORE WEB VITALS?
Google Core Web Vitals, what are they, and how can you use them to optimize your WordPress?
Whether you use WordPress or not, you’re going to stumble upon something called Google Core Web Vitals, or Core Web Metrics, at some point.
Google Core Web Vitals are three specific metrics that measure the speed and user experience on your site. They are primarily concerned with how your website loads rather than your overall load times.
For example, it measures the following:
How quickly visitors can view and interact with your content, even if your site hasn’t fully loaded.
Does your site load smoothly, or does it make jumps and style changes as different resources load?
Are there delays when users try to interact with your site’s content?
Core Web Vitals uses these three metrics:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)-measures load – how long it takes to load the main content on your page. Not all content – only the main content that your visitor sees first. Your LCP should be under 2.5 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID) – measures interactivity – how long it takes for your page to be interactive. That is when a visitor can click on a button or other element. Your FID should be below 100ms (this number will reflect the delay in processing the interaction).
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – measures visual stability – how much your content changes visually as it loads.
For example, if your content “moves” when an ad is displayed. Your CSL should be below 0.1 seconds.
Why should I care about Google Core Web Vitals?
We could tell you many reasons, but there are two big reasons why, as a WordPress user, you should get up to speed and care about Google Core Web Vitals:
USER EXPERIENCE
The first reason is that, according to Google and anyone with a bit of common sense, the main objective when analyzing how your website performs is the user.
By taking into account the Core Web Vitals, you should be able to achieve a better browsing experience for your visitors, avoiding usability errors such as, for example, clicking the wrong button because of a layout jump (CLS) or the controller not working yet (FID).
SEO
The second important reason to take Core Web Vitals into account is, of course, SEO. Google does not take meaningless steps, and when it has “proposed” these measurements intending to make websites more accessible and with a better user experience, it takes them into account for the goal that puts us all in front of it: search positioning.
HOW DO I MEASURE GOOGLE CORE WEB VITALS?
There are fundamental ways to measure Google Core Web Vitals:
- PageSpeed Insights
- Google Search Console
- Lighthouse in your browser
- PageSpeed Insights
A quick way to analyze your website using Core Web Vitals is to use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
Once you enter the URL of the page you want to analyze, you will see the metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID) – Only in the field data
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Google marks the Core Web Vitals metrics with a blue flag.
You will only see the First Input Delay (FID) metric if your site has enough data to provide field data.
If your site does not have much traffic yet, you will only see the experiment data without the First Input Delay (FID) metric, which is based on user interaction and, therefore, depends on your site having enough traffic to have relevant statistical data.
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Another way for us to understand the performance of our site is the Top Web Metrics report included in Search Console.
It’s an instrumental report because, instead of just testing one URL as we do in PageSpeed Insights, it shows issues across your entire site.
If you click on any mobile or desktop reports, you will see a list of specific URLs for improvement in the Core Web Vitals.
Lighthouse in your browser. Finally, you should know that you don’t need to go to external websites or resources; in the same developer console of your browser, you have the Lighthouse engine, which Google uses to determine the Core Web Vitals.
Just right-click anywhere on a page and click “Inspect” to open the developer console.
Once there, go to the tab called “Lighthouse” and launch a report.
You can configure which parameters you want to measure (for Core Web Vitals, the “Performance” one is mandatory) and if you’re going to count for desktop or mobile.
The report generated is complete, just like PageSpeed Insights, with all the details, and you can analyze the tree Core Web Vitals.
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