Google Core Web Vitals is a reflection of the weight of user experience on web content relevance. This is an update by Google to its search engines that considers new aspects of the page to deem it relevant.
Without having to be an expert in User Experience, developers from Web Vitals can understand what would improve the page. Some criteria have become essential for ranking, and to explore them it is important to understand this new update. Follow up!
User Experience Indicators on Pages
To evaluate which pages provide the best visitor experience, Google uses several evaluation parameters. The main purpose is to provide internet users with content that is optimized and provides a good interaction.
HTTPS
In order to ensure user safety on the site, using HTTPS instead of traditional HTTP improves user experience. For this reason, the search engine gives preference to pages that already include this optimization.
Intrusive
The absence of interruptions on the page is also a parameter for Google to consider a good experience or not. The famous pop-ups promote aggressiveness and hinder the user in their navigation, in addition to disfavoring the page in search engines.
Mobile friendly
Google highly values a page that is optimized for mobile devices. Since 2015, this adaptation to mobile and smartphone access has become the rule for results pages.
In 2018, optimizations have become even more important than desktop preview. For this reason, making the layout impeccable for mobile users is essential for a good ranking.
Malware and Security
In addition to HTTPS, biased links and software are penalized by Google. On a search page, pages that contain these elements will hardly be ranked, and lose a lot of relevance.
Social engineering content also greatly harms the user experience as it compromises the reliability of the site. Therefore, when producing content and optimizing the web page, it is essential to assess whether everything is up to date with the guidelines.
What is Google Core Web Vitals?
Google's top evaluation criteria for good user experience have been defined over the years. Google Core Web Vitals, in turn, brings 3 new extremely relevant factors to consider a relevant page, which are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
This is page loading. Currently, if the LCP is longer than 2.5 seconds, the engine automatically sets that the user experience starts to suffer.
It is worth remembering that, if it exceeds 4 seconds, the page's LCP is considered by the engine as "bad". In this case, the improvements are urgent, and if they don't occur, the page's ranking is harmed.
Time is calculated from the visitor entering the page to rendering the densest elements. The metric considers videos, images, layouts, and many other elements of navigation.
First Input Delay (FID)
"First impression remains! ”. The FID measures the time to the first interaction of visits on a page. Therefore, if the visitor finds the content, clicks and takes a long time to receive a response, their experience is harmed.
The idea is to promote interactivity so that the visitor can quickly interact and access what they need. To ensure a good FID, the time between the click and the user's response must be less than 100 milliseconds.
If the FID is between 100 and 300, Google's algorithm already considers it reasonable. If the wait time is greater than 300 milliseconds, the page represents a bad FID and could be harmed by it.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
It predicts that the stability of a page is extremely important for a good experience. Therefore, after loading, changes in page layout are calculated by this metric.
It is worth remembering that the considered changes do not involve new sizes or colors to the page components. In reality, what is considered is the movement of all elements, prioritizing the most stable and static pages.
Starting from the window size, the CLS calculates the movement of elements along this view. Thus, a CLS of 0.1 is considered good, up to 0.25 fair and greater than 0.25 bad.
How do I know if my site is approved and what should I do?
There are some tools that make it possible to measure the metrics we mentioned, which can offer you good insights about it. Some of them are:
- Page Speed : the tool made by Google itself allows measurements related to aspects of Core Web Vitals. It will give good LCP parameters and can point out your site's weaknesses.
- Search console : it will indicate improvements in the part of “Core web vitals.” This tool also belongs to Google and points out improvements so that your page appears among the first results.
- Web Vitals (Chrome extension): this option will indicate the Google Core Web Vitals indexes for every page you visit. Thus, it will also be possible to understand how the competition is performing.
To improve each of the metrics, it is also important to analyze them individually. The LCP is mainly improved with improvements in the images and in the page's CSS itself. It's worth checking what might be less dense, to improve loading.
For the FID, the optimizations are more complex and involve improvements in the site's Java script. It is important to improve site preloads and always seek to compress the content, so that the waiting time after a click is not affected.
Finally, CLS involves major changes to its design and animation. It is important to assess whether, when performing an action such as scrolling the screen, the visitor is faced with elements that enter the scenario by surprise.
In addition to enabling accidental clicks and impairing interactivity, these movements undermine the credibility of the site. Maintain clean, fluid and uninterrupted interactivity to pass the ranking criteria.
The trend that the update that went into effect in 2021 explores was already expected by those who work with SEO . Optimizations that focus on the user and the quality of their interactions allow web content to resolve user queries quickly and reliably.
The focus on the visitor experience transforms the entire web landscape and innovations are aimed at the behavior of the searcher. For this reason, when optimizing it is important to think directly about who will be visiting the page, and their experience with this channel.
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