You may have heard of Google Core Web Vitals but not have any idea what they are.
Essentially they are a series of measures designed to help to quantify key aspects of the user experience. The way your site behaves for users in the real world.
Why do I need to have good Core Web Vitals?
They will affect your search rankings as they send signals to the Google search algorithm about the quality of your website.
Core web vitals are mainly concerned with your UX or user experience.
There are three main components; speed, interactivity and stability.
1. It looks at things like how fast your website is to load – as we know that no-one likes waiting for anything anymore.
2. Interactivity – How long does it take for your website users to be able to interact with your website?
3. Visual stability – so does it wobble from side to side on mobile and is it easy to read on all devices?
There are fancy tech-speak names for each of these elements; Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift but unless you are a web developer you probably don’t need to know this.
User Experience is always important
The most important thing to note is that User Experience is ALWAYS important and now Google is measuring some of the factors that affect user experience and this, in turn, will affect your website’s ranking on Google search.
What should I do?
One thing you can do is to test your site on Google’s Search Console. The advantage is that the tool is free and given that it’s provided by Google then it’s as authoritative as you can get. The disadvantage is that the search console is primarily aimed at web developers. However, if you’re reasonably tech savvy then you should be able to use it to test your site against the Core Web Vitals without too much difficulty although your biggest challenge might be the first hurdle which is verifying your site. This is when you will probably need some help from whoever hosts your website or manages your domain as some code will usually need to be added to verify the site ownership so that you can get started. In fact if you have a helpful hosting company then they might do the verification and run the report on Google Search Console on your behalf. It’s always better to know.
