On Twitter, Google Search Central made an announcement that captured all the attention of a large number of people:
We’re announcing that page experience ranking signals for Google Search will launch in May 2021. This will combine Core Web Vitals and previous UX-related signals.
Those who do SEO and regularly need to check the website indexes on Google Search Console, you must have realized a change. The Speed and Report section of Google Search Console page disappeared, replaced by an item called Core Web Vitals report.
So what is Core Web Vitals and why was it chosen to become a Google ranking factor in the future? How do you make optimal use of Core Web Vitals for your website? All your questions will be answered in the article below.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals is a collection of essential website metrics covering aspects related to the user experience on the page. Core Web Vitals are metrics measured by Chrome UX Report and Google Search Console to assess website performance and rank SEO scores.
Each metric represents an aspect of user experience, corresponding to the following ranking factors:
- Loading: Page loading speed
- Interactivity: Interoperability
- Visual stability: Display stability
There are 4 indicators forming Core Web Vitals:
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): LCP measures the Time to complete the main content that is first displayed when the page has finished loading. The ideal LCP should be at least 2.5 seconds.
FID (First Input Delay): The time the user responds to the first interaction on the website. The FID index needs to be optimized to get under 100 milliseconds.
CLS (Cumulate Layout Shift): The change score. Or it can be understood that this is an indicator of the volume of image layouts that are suddenly shifted on the website. The best CLS that each website needs to achieve for the best experience is no more than 0.1.
FCP (First Contentful Paint): The time is measured when a user sees the first visual response from the page. Faster times are more likely to keep users engaged with your website.
Why do Core Web Vitals Matter?
After spending more than 2 decades continuously educating and orienting webmasters to provide quality content, by 2021, Google now not only wants websites with expert content but the experience of that website must be optimized.
That’s why Core Web Vitals was born and raised its importance as SEO metrics. Moreover, if we go deeper into the survey data, you will easily notice the elements experience, including speed heavily influenced how the SEO results:
In general, expect to lose more than 37% of traffic if your website takes longer than 5 seconds to load. + Walmart discovered that just increasing their loading speed 1s faster, the conversion rate of that site also increased by more than 2%
The same thing with AutoAnything when they increased the speed by 50%, online sales also increased. increased to 11 – 12%.In general, everyone will love a website with fast speed and a smooth experience. This will help keep users longer, read your content more, and be more likely to buy.
Google announced that the signal about the on-page experience will become the deciding factor, in the case of websites with similar ratings for content quality.
Therefore, in addition to producing useful content with the right intention of customers, SEO’ers need to focus their resources on optimizing the experience (Page Experience & Core Web Vitals) and the Page Authority of the page before they can be applied and became key ranking factors.
How do you check core web vitals?
To check the Core Web Vitals indicators on a website or a separate page, Google has various tools with different functions and uses. Let’s check out some of the most popular tools below
1. Google Page Speed Insights
This is the most popular and closest tool for both managers and practitioners to check Core Web Vitals on 1 page.
This tool runs tests in both the test environment and in reality to give you analytics on both mobile and desktop. Not only stopping at measuring metrics, but this page will also provide specific analysis, along with detailed directions for you to improve.
Here’s an example analysis for the NYTimes mobile site.
Statistics from NYTimes Google Page Speed Insights.
If considered on mobile, the website does not pass Core Web Vital assessment because FCP and LCP are low. The reason is that too many ads appear to hide the content and unused JavaSript, causing the initial server response time to be high.
Google Search Console
You can directly use Google Search Console to know the specific problems of some URLs. Specific steps to check the Core Web Vitals index in Google Search Console are as follows:
Step 1: Go to Google Search Console
Step 2: Click “Site Essentials” in the column Advanced Features
Step 3: Click “Reports” on “Desktop” or “Mobile” ”
Step 4: Check each problem type to see some URLs that are having problems
Note: Google Search Console does not show all problematic URLs but only gives you a number. However, based on the URLs reported errors you can also identify the problem on the rest of the pages.
Add Web Vitals (Chrome Extension)
You can conveniently check these metrics on each page with the above tool. Convenient for developers who are directly dealing with these issues and want to quickly check the results.
Other tools
In addition to the 3 popular tools above, Google still has other tools for this problem with more in-depth features (suitable for technical individuals):
– Web. dev/measure: similar to Page Speed Insights, but this tool only measures on mobile (under experimental conditions). Another benefit of this tool is that it will show the process of increasing and decreasing the index over time as well as the SEO index.
– Chrome DevTools Performance panel: is the f12 part of the chrome browser, if you click on the “performance” tab you will know the exact millisecond for FCP, LCP, or at what time the elements are shifted (CLS)
How do you fix core web vitals? Detailed strategies.
Firstly, to thoroughly optimize these Core Web Vitals indicators, you must intervene in the code of the website. However, not everyone has enough programming knowledge, time, and money to prioritize this. If this sounds like your situation, be sure to check out our services page.
So, how can you prepare for Google’s upcoming very important update – Core Web Vitals?
You can immediately refer to the following 4 strategies, which will fix the Core Web Vitals index for your website.
1. Optimizing the size of images on the site
Optimizing the size is essentially reducing the size of the uploaded image but keeping the image quality. Low image size will reduce page load time. In cases where the largest word sections on your page are images (the majority), then optimizing images will directly improve LCP – 1 of 3 important metrics of Core Web Vitals.
If you have not focused or have not done this, you can immediately follow some of the following ways to optimize image size:
– Use online/offline image size optimization software
There are many tools you can choose from. Searching Google will bring up a lot, but I find tinypng.com to be the simplest and easiest to use effective online tool.
– Set the right image size
It is not recommended to leave an image that is too large on the page, even if that image is adjusted to the appropriate scale when displayed. In general, the image size will still be exceeded many times.
– Using a CDN
CDN or Content delivery network, also known as content, helps website owners shorten the time it takes to transmit content to page viewers, including images.
2. Using plugin/add-on support
If you don’t know anything about coding, or it’s really difficult to edit your website, investing in a plugin integrating many advanced functions to improve Core Web Vitals is a good idea; even if it costs more (not much).
Some Plugins you can refer to: WP-rocket, Autoptimize, Jetpack Boost, HummingBird, Wp-Optimize, Smush, and LiteSpeed Cache
3. Remove unnecessary plugins
Too many unnecessary plugins will slow down your website. Check your plugin list and delete the unused ones. According to Authority Checker, here is a list of the 15 most popular plugins that have a negative impact on page load speed:
- Contact Form 7
- Disqus Comment System
- Jetpack
- Broken Link Checker
- NextGen Gallery
- Revolution Slider
- All Social plugins
- WooCommerce
- Yet Another Related Post
- WordFence
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- Updraft/Plus
- Similar Posts
- WordPress Multilingual (WPML)
- WP Super Cache
4. Remove Unnecessary Redirects
Every time your link redirects once, the user will have to wait longer for the page to load a little, which is not good for the experience. experience on the page. It is possible for many reasons such as site transfer, post deletion, that a link can be redirected 2-3 times.
What you can do is check the pages with the most visits, check the internal links attached in the post to see if they are being redirected, and replace them with the correct ones.
You can detect a redirected link through the (incorrect) URL structure or using the help of the following online site: https://redirectdetective.com/.
Does Core Web Vitals Affect Ranking?
Core Web Vitals is optimized for the comfort of website users, which means lower bounce rates. Along with many other page experience signals, Core Web Vital has the potential to affect your website rankings.
Starting mid-June 2021, Core Web Vital will become one of the Google Ranking Signals. That is, for sites that offer the same content, but Google will boost rankings with sites that provide a better user experience.
Core Web Vitals, the website’s experience evaluation index will certainly be an important update of Google in 2021 and an indispensable part for making SEO standard websites in the years to come.
If you invest in improving these metrics today, you will certainly not only have a competitive advantage in SEO are but also contribute to increasing conversion rates on your website. This is a long-distance race for webmasters as well as SEO’ers in optimizing user experience.
