Are Core Web Vitals Really Vital to Your Website Success?

Core Web Vitals are designed by Google for evaluating user experience in the real world. With these metrics, you gain essential information on your website’s performance which can aid score enhancement. They measure the real-world user experience for load time, interactivity and visual stability of the page. Together, these metrics determine the state of UX on your website. What’s more, they are a clear guide on how Google evaluates a website and what pain points might be causing difficulties for conversion.

What are Core Web Vitals?

With Core Web Vitals, Google is striving to push Publishers to provide the best possible user experience and constantly raise the standards of websites. And so, Google has created unique tests that investigate how frictionless the user’s interaction is with your website.

The 3 Core Web Vitals are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – how long a page takes to load from the point when the user clicks on any on-page link to when the page loads on their screen. It’s the only load time-related metric that measures the duration explicitly from the user’s perspective. 
• First Input Delay (FID) – how long it takes for the website to become interactive. This includes clicking on links from the main menu and navigation bar, filling out forms, opening up “accordion text” on mobile devices etc.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – what is the visual stability of the page and that all elements load at the same time rather than having one or two elements load with a time lag.

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Bear in mind that Google measures the scores on a page-by-page basis. This means that every page on your website must load quickly and become interactive immediately; and shift less.

What are the benefits of monitoring and improving them?

Monitoring and adjusting Google Core Web Vitals is crucial for 3 main reasons:

1. Help you identify potential user pain points on your website. When you know what needs to be fixed, it’s much easier to address it and improve your website’s performance.

2. Monitoring the metrics might give you an insight into what might affect decreased content consumption or conversion rates. If users have had a poor experience visiting your website, they are less likely to return.

3. Google uses the Core Web Vitals to rank websites for search results pages. Thus, poor scores might mean lost traffic from search, decreased visibility and as a result drop in sales and/or decreased revenue from ads.

Why do Core Web Vitals matter?

Scoring well on Core Web Vitals is essential if you want your website to rank highly for user experience and appear at the top of the search results. We know for a fact that longer page load times are frustrating for customers and actively encourage them to switch sites. Since the perceived page load times are the primary focus of the metrics, calibrating your website so that it loads quicker is the easiest way to improve your Core Web Vitals scores.

For a more in-depth overview of potential fixes that will improve your metrics, stay tuned for another blog post!

Unsure about what to do next? Yieldbird can help!

In an ever-changing world, the quality of your website determines user engagement. That’s why it’s so important to get Core Web Vitals right! Yieldbird is an industry leader in all Programmatic-related aspects, and now we can also help you make your page both faster and more interactive.