When you have a doctor’s appointment, what are the first things the physician checks out? Is it the health of your nail beds and the hair on your neck? Or, is it your lungs, your heart, your eyes, and so forth?
Google is much like an examining doctor when it comes to evaluating a web user’s experience with any given website: It evaluates the most important parts of a web page’s form and function, and this analysis helps determine how well (or how poorly) a website will be featured in search results. When a site has “healthy” pages, it will rank better. When a site is on the sickly side, to extend my metaphor, it might be lost far down in those search results, hardly ever to be found at all. Which can be a shame, because a site with well-written copy, good deals, funny memes, and so on might be essentially lost just because a few elements weren’t properly in place.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
There are three main core web vitals (CWV) Google looks to, and I’ll break those down in detail in a moment. To give you a top-level understanding, though, Google’s core web vitals are essentially an analysis of how well a web page loads. That is to say, how quickly the page loads, how well formatted the page appears once loaded, and how responsive it is to user interaction. If Google were the doctor in my example above, the vitals can be thought of as those things that just have to be in place to call a page healthy.
What Are the Main Core Web Vitals?
The three main core web vitals that Google considers when evaluating a web page — and determining how well it will rank in search engine page results (SERPs) — are as follows:
LCP: Largest Contentful Paint
This is the measure of how long it takes the largest “content element” of a page to load fully. Think of a large carousel of images atop a page, or a video waiting to become visible. Google can measure a page’s overall loading speed (or sluggishness).
CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift
You’ve probably noticed that some web pages are shaky, unstable, and erratic as they load, with content appearing in different places, loading layered over other parts of the page, and generally what might be called wonky, to use a nontechnical term. That’s high layout shift, which is not a good thing in the eyes of Google’s algorithms. Pages that maintain visual stability as they load have lower shift, which Google likes, because it makes a user’s experience better.
INP: Interaction to Next Paint
Formerly called first input delay (FID), INP measures the responsivity of a web page to a user’s action, be that clicking on a link or video on a computer, or tapping something on a smartphone or tablet.
Why Are Core Web Vitals Important?
Core web vitals are important because they measure potential user experience, and in so doing, greatly influence search engine rankings.
They measure the aforementioned aspects of a web page’s performance (loading speed of major visual elements, visual stability, and user interactivity efficiency) which significantly impact how users perceive and interact with a website. By focusing on making sure these metrics are in good order, site owners/managers improve user satisfaction and potentially increase conversions. In this way, paying attention to core web vitals is a part of search engine optimization (SEO) that can’t be overlooked.
This is also very much the case for marketers placing paid ads online. Core web vitals can have a large impact on the performance and cost-effectiveness of paid advertising campaigns, for better or for worse. Optimizing core web vitals for landing pages can lead to better ad rankings, lower cost-per-click rates (CPC), and improved conversion rates.
How Did the Last Google CWV Update Affect Websites?
The last major CWV update at the time of this writing was in March of 2024, though Google has made several additional changes since then, such as that INP replacement of FID noted above. The updates have mostly re-emphasized the importance Google puts on user experience, further attempting to improve the quality of user experience by prioritizing high-quality content and penalizing low-quality pages and sites.
Quality Content Prioritization
The update intends to show users more content that is high-quality, genuinely useful, and fact-based (when applicable), and less content that feels as though it has been created primarily for search engines to track it down and serve it up.
Reranking
The March 2024 core web value update initiated the reranking of many sites, with those found to be populated largely with AI-created images and content being reduced in rank, while those with genuinely original copy and graphics were weighted more heavily.
Site Deindexing
Google has become much more active in its deindexing of websites it finds to have extra low-quality content, or that it finds to be in violation of its policies. The company stated that it aimed for a 45% reduction of poor-quality content.
Core Web Vitals Effect on Ads
If the sites on which you’re running ads have poor core web vitals, you’re probably throwing away a lot of cash.
CLS Issues
CLS stands for cumulative layout shift, a measure of a web page’s visual stability as it loads. CLS can significantly impact ad performance and revenue, as poor CLS (often caused by ads loading asynchronously and by shifting page content) leads to a negative user experience, potentially resulting in lower ad engagement, missed impressions, reduced conversions, and lost ad revenue.
Heavy Ad Issues
Heavy ads are online advertisements that consume excessive system resources, leading to slow website loading times and increased data usage. CWVs significantly impact the performance and effectiveness of heavy ads by influencing user experience and ad revenue. Poor CWV caused by heavy ads can result in missed impressions, higher CPCs, and lower ad revenue.
Paid Ads
Core web vitals significantly impact paid advertising, particularly within Google Ads. Websites with strong CWVs often experience better ad rankings, lower cost-per-click rates, and increased ad revenue.
Lazy Load Ads
Lazy loading is a technique where ads are loaded only when they are about to become visible on a user’s screen, rather than all ads being loaded at once when the page itself initially loads. This approach improves a site’s performance by reducing the initial load time. CWVs significantly impact lazy-loaded ads. Properly implemented lazy loading can improve page load times and enhance user experience, which positively affects CWV evaluation.
Key Takeaways
Core web vitals are a pulse check Google uses to analyze how well a web page would perform in the eyes of a user. CWV involves three primary metrics: LCP (largest contentful paint), INP (interaction to next paint), and CLS (cumulative layout shift). These measure load speed of major visual elements, the speed at which a page reacts to user actions, and the visual stability of a page as it loads, respectively. When these metrics are all in good working order, it improves a site’s search engine optimization and can lead to more views and, in many cases, better ad revenue. When a site’s CWV is off, it can mean the site is buried in Google search results and ad spend is wasted.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Why do people worry about core web vitals?
People who manage sites care about CWV because they are a set of metrics that directly impact user experience and, consequently, influence search engine rankings. By optimizing for these vitals, websites can improve user engagement, reduce bounce rates, and potentially achieve higher rankings in search results, making them a crucial aspect of SEO.
Why is it called “paint” in CWV?
The term “paint” in this context is used because much of core web vital analysis is about how quickly pixels load and change. Think of those pixels as digital paint that shifts to show new content, be it video, ads, text, and more.
What is the most important core web vital?
All are important measures of overall web page health and performance, but one could argue that LCP, or largest contentful paint, is the most important, because the loading of major visual elements plays a major role in how users perceive the overall efficacy of a site.
