Don’t Neglect Core Web Vitals, Google Rolling Out New Update Now
It’s official; Google announced on the 15th June 2021 that they have started rolling out their page experience update. The process is further finalised throughout June & July 2021 and potentially into August still. This update was supposed to have been released in May, but a last-minute pull back from the search engine giant.
The page experience update is now slowly rolling out (Top Stories will begin using this new signal by Thursday). It will be complete by the end of August 2021. More here: https://t.co/kDwhhOYklK
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) June 15, 2021
People are already reporting movement in their organic traffic numbers since the new Google core rollout. Some people see huge increased website traffic, and others are seeing decreases in visitors.
How do I test my websites Core Web Vitals (CWVs)?
Thankfully, Google provides all of the tools you need to test your Core Web Vitals and provides clear advice for improving each metric.
Tools to Test Core Web Vitals
What are Core Web Vitals (CWVs)?
Core Web Vitals are a set of website user-experience metrics that apply to websites and pages and are used by Google robots to quantify the user experience (UX) on your website.
Core Web Vitals should be considered SEO Best practices.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a metric used to interpret how long it takes for the largest web page elements to load. It’s an accurate test of the overall load speed of your website’s pages.
- First Input Delay (FID) is a user-centric, page experience metric introduced by Google to measure how responsive a website is to a user. Essentially, it measures how long it takes for your website to be fully interactive to the user.
- Cumulative Layout Shift is a page experience metric introduced to measure a webpages stability when loading. Lighthouse looks at how elements such as images, adverts and containers shift when loading. For example, if you don’t set explicit heights to images, then they would start 0px later ‘shifting’ to the height determined by the image itself.
Web Vitals are ever-changing, and Google will continue to adapt and grow Core Web Vitals over time as the internet evolves and technology improves.