Google is on a mission to save the internet! In order to do this, it’s taking a closer look at something called Core Web Vitals. Although it sounds like something from a Casualty script, it’s a major change in how Google ranks your website.

In order to help you get started, I’ve pulled together a short guide that answers the following questions:

What are Core Web Vitals?
What does this mean for your online marketing?
What can I do to improve Core Web Vitals on my website?

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are made up of three important measurements of a user’s experience on a website. Loading time, page interactivity, and visual stability. In other words, it looks at how fast your website loads, whether text and images bounce all over the page and how quickly you can start using the website when it first appears on your screen.

Before you continue reading, I’d advise adding the Lighthouse Chrome Extension and generating a report by opening up the extension in your Google Chrome browser. This will give you a quick overview of how your website’s Core Web Vitals are looking (the results will look like the image below).

Alternatively, if your website is using Google Search Console, refer to the Core Web Vitals tab for the latest measurements, which you can see below in the left-hand column under the experience section.

What does this mean for your digital marketing

In order to improve our internet experience, Core Web Vitals will become a key ranking factor in June. If you don't take action now, you may see your website position in the search rankings start to tumble.

Google has identified these three measurements as a vital part of our experience on a website. Simply put, Google doesn't want to send its users to rubbish websites. They are future-proofing their business and in turn, making the internet a better experience for all of us.

Core Web Vitals – key measurements

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Don't you just hate it when you’re reading an article on a webpage and all of sudden, the text moves. Or even worse, when you're bashing your keyboard furiously to shut down a pop up and you accidentally click it because it moved suddenly.

The CLS metric gives you an idea of how often and how badly this is impacting user experience. If text or images suddenly move across the page whilst someone is on your site, then your Core Web Vitals score will be negatively impacted.

First Input Delay (FID)

Have you ever landed on a website and no matter how many times you press buttons nothing happens? It’s annoying, right? This is why Google has made this a key part of the Core Web Vitals.

First impressions matter. And it's no different in the digital world. When you land on a website, you want to be able to take action almost immediately. FID measures the time it takes from clicking on a website link to being able to take action on the site.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Your LCP measurement looks at the overall loading time across your whole website. So, from the moment you land on the website until the largest image or text block has loaded.

Naturally, this takes longer than your FID but you'll want to get the overall loading time of your website down to 2.5 seconds. After researching hundreds of websites, I’ve come across some that take up to 20 seconds to fully load. In the age of ultra-fast broadband, that's a lifetime and Google will start to make them pay via their search rankings.

How to improve your Core Web Vitals

Now that you've got a better understanding of Core Web Vitals and hopefully, had a look at your website’s overall score, you’ll want to know what you can do to improve it.

At this stage, you'll want to start discussing these things with your website developer, as the solutions to many of these issues are quite technical.

However, to make sure you're armed with the right information, I’ve outlined a few things to relay to them as a starting point.

How to keep things still on your website pages

As I’ve mentioned, there’s nothing more annoying than your text moving about the webpage whilst you try and read it. To help you deal with images and text bouncing around, here are a few things your web developer should look at:

Adding the height and width of images to the website code. It will ensure your browser knows exactly what space is available to upload the image too and will prevent it continuously changing as it loads.
Using containers, which are basically designated boxes for the ads to load on your webpage. I've seen this so many times, particularly on news websites, where an article gets pushed down after I’ve started reading it to make room for the display ads.

Why is website loading time important?

It's really important to improve your initial loading time, as it’s the number one reason visitors will leave your website.

Unfortunately, this one gets really technical and you'll need to optimise your Java Script execution. If you’re a marketer like me, I suggest sharing this article from Google Web Developers with your web team, as it will help them understand what they’ll need to do to make the necessary improvements.

Get your website to load faster

As I mentioned, you’ll want to speed up the time it takes from a user clicking on your website URL to all the images and text loading. So, here are a couple of things to discuss with your web developer to help improve your website:

Images are often the largest contributor to slow website loading times, so optimise them by compressing their size. There are lots of software and tools available online to do this, but I suggest Short Pixel.
Talk to your web developer about using Image CDNs. These are Content Delivery Networks which are servers around the world that help improve website page speed load times. For example, if you get website traffic from different countries, these networks ensure that regardless of where a user is located, they get the same loading experience.
Ask your web developer if they can defer any non-critical JavaScript to speed up the loading time of your main website content. If they’re any good, they can change the order of what is loaded on your website.

Conclusion

Despite the Core Web Vitals becoming a major ranking factor in the next few months, don't panic, your website is not going to fall into obscurity overnight.

However, it's a good time to start working on making improvements, as doing so will not only maintain your current search position but could also see your website rise up the rankings in 2021 and beyond.

Get in touch

At Sookio, we provide PPC, SEO and copywriting services to ensure your website is ranking for the keywords that matter to your target audience.

Get in touch now and let us help you get your website in front of your potential customers.

What are Core Web Vitals and why are they important?