
Core Web Vitals: Google Uses User Experience to Rank Websites
The best place to hide a body is on the second page of Google because few people make it past the first page. How can you increase your visibility on Google's search engines? By working on your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)! However, it's not as easy as it sounds because ranking a page on search engine results pages considers factors in different aspects like site characteristics, backlinks, and (quite recently) user experience.
Google has about 200 ranking factors, making it difficult for businesses to work on all of them. Clever marketers are instead finding the dominant factors in the rankings, and focusing on improving on them.
This is why the announcement of the set of new core web vitals by Google in May 2020, is a game-changer. It shows a shift of focus in Google site rankings from being dependent on accumulating keywords to evaluating user experience.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Web vitals give the search engine general guidance for a site's quality to ensure that the highly ranked pages reflect the level of user experience required. This way, the sites that offer the best visitor experience get ranked higher and are then more visible.
Core web vitals are the subset of the web vitals that apply to all pages and are used on Google tools.
The core web vitals include;
1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
How long does a site load from the perspective of the user?
LCP measures how much time it takes for the largest content element on a page to load after clicking the site's link. This provides a user experience perspective as site visitors usually get frustrated at some sites that take longer to retrieve the information they need.
Before the adoption of this metric, Google used First Meaningful metric to judge the page speed. The metric could, however, not always figure out the meaningful content to base the assessment on, leading to unusable data.
An LCP score of less than 2.5 seconds is considered fast, one that is between 2.5 seconds and 4 seconds needs improvement, and a score of more than 4 seconds is considered poor. Website managers should ensure their sites achieve a fast LCP score to have a chance of being ranked highly.
2. First Input Delay (FID)
This is a measure of interactivity. How long does your website take to react to a user's first interaction? For your website to qualify as having good user experience, its FID should be less than 100 milliseconds.
A user's first interaction could be anything from tapping a button, clicking on a page on your site or even an image. Whichever action the user takes, the response has to be extremely quick because slow websites can be frustrating and make your website seem slow and sluggish. In fact, a study by Google revealed that 46% of web users on mobile devices dislike slow websites the most. You should, however, know that continuous actions like zooming in and out on a page or scrolling are not counted as interactions.
What if a user doesn't interact with your website? Well, the truth is that not all users who visit your site will take action on it. This will not affect your FID score as Google only considers users that actually interact with your page. Users will also have varying FID scores depending on the pages that they interact with.
A first input delay ranging from 100 ms to 300 ms needs improvement, but anything above 300 is extremely slow. One of the major culprits of low FID score is javascript, especially those with complex code.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
The cumulative layout shift is a new metric that assesses the visual stability of a page. The metric does this by measuring how often the content of a webpage shifts from frame to frame.
Visitors to a page can get frustrated when a page jumps around as it loads, forcing them to interact with the content they did not intend to. Ads on the webpage are a common cause of a low CLS score since they increase to the level of shifting content on the page.
When users click on a link to view specific content and are interrupted by ads or other pages before they load, they can get frustrated, making their experience on the site worse.
A CLS score of less than 0.1 is good. A score of 0.25 needs improvement, while that of more than 0.25 is considered poor.
Other web vitals that Google uses to assess levels of page experience include;
- Mobile Friendliness
- Lack of Intrusive Interstitials
- Safe Browsing
- HTTPS

How Can You Improve Your Core Web Vitals?
- Increase the speed of your servers
Go for an affordable hosting plan that doesn't compromise on speed. This will considerably reduce your loading time and respond to queries faster.
- Specify room for images
Images that lack dimensions in the CSS cause cumulative layout gif (CLS). While optimizing the CLS doesn't exactly increase your load times, it does make your site feel faster. Reserving space for your images eliminates the jerkiness caused by CLS since the browser is aware that an element has to load.
- Optimize your images
Most large contentful paints are caused by large images. Optimizing your images ensures your landing page loads quickly, giving site visitors a proper welcome.
You should also optimize third-party apps.

Why Google is Moving to the Use of Core Web Vitals
Google is not only looking to surface websites that are relevant and authoritative, but also those offering a wonderful user experience. No matter how informative a site is, if it takes time to load, does not interact well enough or shifts from frame to frame, it will result in poor experience.
By improving the user experience, you have a better chance of appearing on the first page and that will do wonders for your business.
User experience is already one of the dominant considerations when ranking websites, and the adoption of the core web vitals is an indication that this is the future.