What is core web vitals and why is it important for your website?
Optimising your website for user experience is essential for the long-term success of your website.
User experience (sometimes abbreviated to UX) can be defined as:-
‘a person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use or their anticipations from the use of a product or service.
In simple terms, it is how you feel about your interactions with a product or service.
It can be difficult to quantify user experience in terms of websites but we all have experienced websites that we ‘just don’t like using’ or frustrate us. We invariably leave these websites and visit others.
It is incumbent on a website owner to ensure that the user experience from their website (on any device) is as optimal as it can be.
Good user experience generally results in higher website conversion rates, increasing sales and ultimately the bottom line.
Google’s Core Web Vitals initiative
Google has introduced an initiative to provide guidance on what a great user experience on a website should be and what are the essential areas to consider in creating and maintaining one.
Initially, Google will concentrate on 3 aspects of user experience and now produces metrics to allow a website to be measured against them.
The three aspects of user experience are:-
Loading
This measures how quickly a website loads.
Google uses a measurement that it calls the Largest Contentful Paint.
This is the time it takes the largest image or text block to load and be visible.
What is a good LCP Score?
Google recommends that websites should aim to have their LCP score at less than 2.5 seconds.
Interactivity
Interactivity measure by First Input Delay
First Input Delay measures the time from when a user of a website interacts (e.g. click a link or tap on a button) to when the browser begins processing that interaction.
What is a good FID Score?
Google’s recommendation for good user experience is to aim for a score of less than 100 milliseconds.
Visual Stability
We have all been on a website when something suddenly changes – often without warning.
The text moves and suddenly you have lost your place on the website.
Or, you are about to click on a button and it moves and you end up clicking the wrong button.
Most of the times these user experiences are just annoying or frustrating but they can cause real damage as you may purchase a product or activate a download that you didn’t intend.
In the example below, we can see how sudden movements result in clicking on the wrong button
Google refers to this as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
To maintain good user experience, websites should aim to have a CLS Score of less than 0.1
If you have any questions about Core Web Vitals and your website get in touch.