Google Web Vitals: Metrics for a high-performance website

Optimizing the quality of the user experience is the key to the long-term success of any website. However, the abundance of metrics and tools poses a number of challenges for many in terms of prioritizing the ranking factors for technological search engine optimization (SEO). Why not build on the public standard of the industry leader itself? Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide consistent guidelines for quality, which we believe are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.

What exactly do Google Web Vitals mean?

Measuring the quality of the user experience can have many facets. Core Web Vitals are a set of real user-centric metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. While some aspects of user experience are location and context specific, there is a common denominator of metrics: The Core Web Vitals, which are critical to Web experiences. These core user experience requirements include loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability of page content. Together, these metrics form the foundation of Google's Core Web Vitals.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the perceived loading speed and marks the point in the page load time axis where the main content of the page was loaded.

First Input Delay (FID) measures responsiveness and quantifies the experience that users feel when they try to interact with the site for the first time.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability and quantifies the extent of unexpected layout shift of visible page content.

Optimization for these factors makes the web more attractive to users across all web browsers and interfaces and helps sites meet the expectations of users on mobile devices. We believe that this will contribute to business success on the Web because users will be able to engage more and interact with less effort.

Where can I measure the Google Core Web Vitals?

• Lighthouse
• PageSpeed Insights
• Google Search Console

Requirements for the web and effective SEO

The three Core Web Vitals metrics are currently the most important aspects of the user experience, but there are other metrics that are not yet covered by the Core Web Vitals. In order to improve our understanding of the user experience in the future, we expect to update the Core Web Vitals annually and provide regular updates on future metrics, motivation and implementation status.

In the future, Google intends to integrate all of these experiences and metrics more closely into the ranking to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user's experience on a web page. A good content marketing strategy is still the most important catalyst in the competition for a good ranking, but with equivalent content, technology is the decisive point.

Sources

Evaluating page experience for a better web, Thursday, May 28, 2020, https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.html

Web Vitals, Thursday, May 28, 2020, https://web.dev/vitals/