Without ‘Core Web Vitals’, it would have been difficult to know how effective the user experience is. These core web vitals are the standards for web developers to help them know if their development efforts are on the right track or direction. CWV judge the effectiveness of the website based on three parameters:
- Page Loading Speed
- Ease of interaction
- Stability of visuals
Developers can’t channel their web development efforts if they don’t have any clue regarding the user’s perspective. Therefore, they rely on core web vitals which help them to know – ‘How convenient would it be for users to interact with the user?’
An Important Note: These CWV don’t cover all the factors required to enrich a website’s user experience; rather, these present the fundamental but essential aspects of UX. Besides, these metrics provide a perfect approach to troubleshooting technical issues with the website.
What are we waiting for? Let’s proceed further to grab a thorough understanding of
CORE WEB VITALS
LCP – Largest Contentful Paint
Usually, a user decides whether to stay a bit longer on the website within 5 seconds. These 5 seconds are crucial for a website: ‘ More than 72.34% users never prefer to revisit a website they’ve not found useful once.’ From this point of view, we can conclude that – ‘If we don’t work on bettering the LCP, we may lose many potential customers to our competitors.’
So the question is – ‘What exactly is required to make user’s 5 seconds longer?’
As per the LCP metric, in the first place, it requires a REDUCED PAGE LOAD TIME to make the 5 seconds stay comfortable. This factor is not only essential from the user’s POV (point of view), but Google also ranks websites with an ideal page load time on the 1st SERP.
It’s Important – You know what? There is something worse than ‘The Slow Page Load Times’ – SNAPPY LOAD TIMES. Such issues are known to impact user engagement and conversion rates to a significant point.
Let’s Get Into Details – LCP only measures the load time or the render time of the elements present above the fold – images, background images, video poster images and block-level text.
Tip No. 1
An ideal LCP is – 2.5 seconds. Make sure it doesn’t exceed!
CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift
A web design is full of CTA buttons and links. But many users fail to get engaged with such calls to action. This metric will help the developers assess the difficulty users may face in engaging with such links and buttons.
Apart from that, this metric also scores user experience based on the shaking and shifting of elements when a user is accessing your website. Such things can make the user feel frustrated. So this metric is basically responsible for ensuring that no disturbance is encountered with the elements.
Let’s Get Into the Details
CLS basically assesses whether the visible viewport is moving or fluctuating between two rendered frames. This metric ensures that buttons, text and banners stay in place when the user reads content on the given page. The following factors are taken into account when the user judges the performance of a website through CLS –
- Layout shift
- Distance Fraction
- Impact fraction
Tip No. 2
An Ideal CLS is 0.1 seconds.
FID – First Input Delay
The total amount of time elements take to respond to a user’s input is called FID (First Input Delay). In this day and age, websites make use of terribly advanced technologies and widgets to serve content to their audience. Though the benefit of such things improves how content is delivered to the users, these enhancements can cause delays in content delivery. It is something Google dislikes strongly, as it hinders the user experience.
Let’s Get Into the Details
The primary function of FID is to check how responsive the elements on the website are. This element records various events like clicks and key presses.
Tip No. 03
An Ideal FID is usually ‘Below 100 milliseconds’.
From the definition of the FID, we’re clear with the fact – ‘It is quintessentially difficult to measure data through FID, as data can only be measured in the field.’
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It’s NOT OVER YET!
As we mentioned at the blog’s beginning, Core Web Vitals helps web developers improve their UX. The vitals discussed above are the most predominant of all. They are not only three in number. Here are some more Core Web Vitals that help developers understand how their code influences how users consume content.
FCP – First Contentful Paint
First, Contentful Paint (FCP) measures the total amount of time taken by the user’s browser to render various DOM elements –
- Non-white <Canvas> elements
- SVGs
- Images
SI – Speed Index
Speed Index is one of the valuable metrics that tells how much time your content takes to display to a user.
TTI – Time To Interactive
It is the total amount of time taken by the content on your page to appear functional. This metric helps find pages with unnecessary javascript. The time is usually quantified in seconds.
TBT – Time Blocking Time
TBT measures the time taken by a web page to respond to the user’s input. Like TTI, TBT is also helpful in figuring out unnecessary javascript pages.
Page Performance Scores
PPS is the name of the single metric that cumulates all the critical metrics in Core Web Vitals. With the help of a cumulative score system, it put forth pages that need closer examination. Web developers usually channelize their efforts based on this table:
| 90 | Good |
| 50-90 | Needs Improvement |
| Below 50 | Poor |
Final Comments!
If you are truly willing to take your site to the first page of SERP, you must check your site against all the parameters mentioned above. The Core Web Vitals can improve your website, not only from the user’s point of view, but these are among many ranking factors that Google considers to rank your website.
With the introduction of CWV it has become easy to know where we are lacking and how much improvement is needed.
