You should know that Google Search recently revealed the upcoming ranking factor for search engines that will update the metrics for web page experience. Now, these metrics include the Core Web Vitals, which provide a fairly comprehensive image of the consistency of user interactions on a website, along with a few other alerts.
Google has already announced that starting in May 2021, the Core Web Vitals will become the ranking signal. With this, Google would merge Core Web Vitals with similar variables encountered by previous users. We just need to step back now and look at this critically, so SEOs will find this much more beneficial. That means, everyone in the marketing community needs to have at least some basic understanding of what’s involved.
Well, it will not be going to remain that way that Google has said they’re sort of planning to update this periodically so it’s going to be helpful to make long-term plans and have an idea of the direction we hope this will evolve in. The best way to think about the main web vitals in their present state is to use Google as a collection of three indicators to approximate the efficiency of a website’s user experience.
They will implement these metrics into their ranking algorithm in May 2021, which means that websites that have a good experience will rank higher and websites that sadly do not normally rank lower.
Google also intends to add some kind of label or checkmark to the results pages of the search engine to show what users can expect from a website. So this will be important both for your rankings and likely also for your click-through rate, and Google has said that they have actually seen a 70 rise in the use of the tools they use to calculate these various benchmarks, which means that many developers and marketing managers are already testing their website’s status or actively taking steps to imprint them.
What are Core Web Vitals?
A collection of metrics related to speed, responsiveness, and visual stability are the Core Web Vitals. The Core Web Vitals uses three metrics to measure all three dimensions of the user experience. The first one is the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which tests the efficiency of packing or measures loading performance, the second is First Input Delay (FID) that tests interactivity, and the final third one is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLC) that tests the consistency of the layout.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
According to Google, “sites should aim for Largest Contentful Paint to occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load to provide a successful user experience. A reasonable threshold to calculate is the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented between mobile and desktop devices, to ensure you reach this target for most of your users.”
What Google is really calculating to do this is how long it takes for the largest feature on a page to completely appear and render for the user, and it’s just looking at stuff above the fold. LCP is meant to estimate the loading time of a page now. So the more commonly visited pages on your website are overwhelmingly relevant, so, for example, your home page really needs to load as quickly as possible to obtain a good two-second or less score for this 75 percent of the time or more.
There are a few different ways to find out, go to the Google Search Console first to look at the data that is there because that is human data in the real world, which is the kind of data that Google would use when measuring your website.
Using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, the other way you can check your website speed, simply to put your website URL and wait for a few seconds, and then it will show you the website speed result. You can see some useful details about your website speed in this PageSpeed Insights result, including rendering resource blocking, unused JavaScript, server response time, Java execution time, and several errors you have to correct.
There’s another speed measuring tool called Chrome’s DevTools, it’s a compilation of kinds of developer-centric tools to spell out exactly what happens when a page loads, and this is really where you’re going to get the kind of administration level technical specifics a developer will need to make changes to address LCP and several of these other key site vitals, like FID and CLS.
To better understand, check out the below images that I have been found in Google Core Web Vitals documentation:
First Input Delay (FID)
According to Google, “FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (i.e. when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction.”
“To provide a good user experience, sites should strive to have a First Input Delay of fewer than 100 milliseconds. To ensure you’re hitting this target for most of your users, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop devices.”
FID is aimed to encourage websites that give a decent user interface in consideration of response time when a user enters the page that could just be clicking in a search field or anything else like that. Google will calculate for this is the time between the occurrence and the clicking or keystroke and how long it takes for the page to start processing.
FID accesses data from the Google Search Console, but it does not access from PageSpeed Insights because it is not a metric that can be calculated in the laboratory or by a computer, it depends only on a page’s human interaction. That means that in order to get that calculation, you have to have real-world data.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
For any unforeseen layout shift that occurs throughout the entire lifetime of the page, CLS calculates the sum total of all individual layout shift ratings. Every time a visible entity shifts its location from one rendered frame to the next, a layout shift happens. Sites should aspire to provide a CLS score of less than 0.1 to have a reasonable user experience. A reasonable threshold to calculate is the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented between mobile and desktop devices, to ensure you reach this target for most of your users.
CLS can be applied to the quality of a website where nothing changes suddenly or without any kind of user interaction with the layout. For instance, if the user tries to click on a button, but the last millisecond before the user clicks the button unexpectedly changes the layout and the user clicks on the wrong place or button and it’s extremely irritating.
By supporting websites that have good visual functionality, Google is trying to prevent those situations so that to excel with this metric essentially what it means is that you should not have the layout of your page sort of change of its own volition, it can only change the layout in response to user interaction, so the aim of this metric is to hit 0.1 or less cumulative layout move. Check out the official illustration by Google Core Web Vitals by showing how adding content to an existing element affects the layout shift score:
The “Click Me!” button is appended to the bottom of the gray box with black text, which pushes the green box with white text down (and partially out of the viewport).
In this example, the gray box changes size, but its start position does not change so it’s not an unstable element.
The “Click Me!” button was not previously in the DOM, so its start position doesn’t change either.
The start position of the green box, however, does change, but since it’s been moved partially out of the viewport, the invisible area is not considered when calculating the impact fraction. The union of the visible areas for the green box in both frames (illustrated by the red, dotted rectangle) is the same as the area of the green box in the first frame—50% of the viewport. The impact fraction is 0.5.
The distance fraction is illustrated with the purple arrow. The green box has moved down by about 14% of the viewport so the distance fraction is 0.14. The layout shift score is 0.5 x 0.14 = 0.07.
Through the Google Search Console, CLS data can be calculated that you can find interesting real-world human data or you can use CLS metrics in the Google PageSpeed Insights tool or use Google’s in-house Chrome DevTools, where you can see all the individual layout changes that add up to the total layout shift.
To learn more about these three Vitals, see Google Core Web Vitals documentation.
We may receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article at no cost to you, though all opinions are our own. For more information, please read our ethics statement. Please note that pricing and availability are subject to change.
So, how can you improve your website ranking on Google with MonsterInsights?
MonsterInsights is a WordPress plugin, it can measure analytics data in a smart way, and it’s very easy to use. Monsterinsights is the advanced analytics plugins where you can measure all of your Google Analytics reports in real-time, Google Search Console reports, it can also measure E-commerce reports, as well as SEO ranking reports.
MonsterInsights uses a universal tracking system, where you can track all devices and campaigns in just a few simple clicks without any code implementation, it will also help website owners to easily track file downloads by enabling tracking for file downloads, it also tracks which page is the most view, which file is most downloaded, or which country is getting most file downloads. If you use SEO on your website, it will automatically track all SEO scores and you will find SEO stats directly in the MonsterInsights, where you can see how it impacts your traffic.
If you have a tool like this you can almost track anything on your website including, category tracking, tag tracking, keywords tracking, email link tracking, media tracking, as well as you can track your custom events without writing any JavaScript.
I have already talked about Google Core Web Vitals in the starting, about how Google will change ranking factors in starting of May 2021.
Recently, MonsterInsights have introduced a new Site Speed in their dashboard, where you can measure and improve your user experience by experimenting on your site, which will tell how quickly your website loads and how fast your website. With Site Speed toll in MonsterInsights, you can test your website speed directly from the MonsterInsights dashboard without going to Google’s PageSpeed page.
If your will loads faster, then you may happy with that, but what happens it doesn’t load quicker than you think, I know it will irritate the situation for the user experience, as well as the impact on your SEO ranking. But, there is a lot of form factors running behind your website.
The simple way to say, some website has lots of content on their website including, heavy images or videos. But what happened when they didn’t optimize their images and videos for their website, obviously that type of website will get slower speed in terms of loading time, as well as lower score in Google PageSpeed Insights. Actually, this type of website can be easily optimized by compressing images or videos using tools like SHORTPIXEL. But that didn’t mean every website can be optimized using compression tools.
So, if you want to upload images or videos without compromising on quality or size, then you have a better chance to use CDN (Content Delivery Network) tools like StackPath, which will be helping load your website much faster with their global edge server around the world. Now you think, What is CDN? And How it works?
CDN is a geographically based proxy server network and data center. The CDN provides high usability and efficiency by spatially distributing the service relative to end-users. CDN makes it possible to easily migrate the assets necessary to load Internet content, including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. The popularity of CDN services continues to grow, and today most web traffic, including traffic from major sites such as Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon, is served by CDNs.
See the image down below illustrated by Cloudflare for a better understanding:
CDN server help website visitors to quickly access the website content with much better and faster speed, by optimizing all contents. Having a CDN server on your website will benefit you and of course for your visitors because your audiences love to visit your website using better speed, thanks to global edge servers.
CDN server also helps to reduce bounce rates and increase the amount of time that people spent on your website. CDN server also reduces the cost of Bandwidth of your server-side, CDN server will reduce the amount of data on the origin server, which means it will reduce the hosting cost for you. If you want to use Cloudflare CDN, then it will help you against DDoS attacks, and improve security, and optimization.
I hope you understand how page speed can impact your SEO and website speed when you did not optimize them. And please consider optimizing your web pages before May 2021, because Google will change the ranking factors in terms of web speed.
Check out our FREE Blog Setup service.
