Many businesses face the decision of what content management system (CMS) to run their websites on. Web design agencies need to make the same decision for the clients who come to them seeking help in getting a nicely designed site online and establishing a web presence.
An important factor in any choice of CMS is how well that platform performs for core web vitals. After all, core web vitals are an actual factor in how Google decides to rank websites on search engine results pages. To compare different companies in terms of how they’re performing over time for core web vitals,
check out this report.
Optimizing for these three primary areas of user experience is what Google wants from websites. After all, Google’s business model is to serve users with the best search results—linking users to web pages with a bad user experience directly affects Google’s reputation. Here are some other brief reminders about why Core Web Vitals matter:
The three core web vitals are largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift. Each of these metrics respectively relates to the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of a web page. In other words, is anything happening on the page, is it responding to a user’s input, and is it enjoyable to navigate? Each of these metrics has thresholds that signify Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor scores based on empirical data across millions of user sessions.
Many businesses face the decision of what content management system (CMS) to run their websites on. Web design agencies need to make the same decision for the clients who come to them seeking help in getting a nicely designed site online and establishing a web presence.
An important factor in any choice of CMS is how well that platform performs for core web vitals. After all, core web vitals are an actual factor in how Google decides to rank websites on search engine results pages. To compare different companies in terms of how they’re performing over time for core web vitals,
check out this report.
Desktop page experience update
At the time of writing in February 2022, Google is currently bringing page experience as a ranking factor to desktop. Previously, Core Web Vitals only mattered from a ranking perspective for mobile sites. This led to a situation in which SEOs, designers, and other web professionals only cared about optimizing site design and functionality on mobile in order to improve their scores. With the rollout of the page experience update for desktop expected to finish by the end of March 2022, it will become vital to optimize CWV scores across both desktop and mobile versions of websites.
New additions to CWV?
While Core Web Vitals are a good way to approximate user experience, there are some factors missing. Consistent speculations about potential upcoming evolutions in Core Web Vitals focus on two areas:
Neither of these has been finalized as additions to CWV, but they’re definitely worth keeping an eye on.
Webmasters and SEO professionals often become so focused on getting clicks through to content from search engines that they forget to optimize what happens once you get people on a website. It’s not a new visitor that earns money for businesses; it’s engaged visitors who enjoy using a website that bring money. Performance really does equal money when it comes to websites, so it’s important to optimize user experience as much as possible.
From a ranking perspective, SEOs face continual trade-offs about how best to spend their limited time and make the biggest difference to the results their clients or employers want. It’s unlikely that Core Web Vitals will fundamentally change the ranking landscape in terms of Google over-indexing sites that score well. As an SEO, spend some time on CWV optimization, but not at the expense of other areas, such as off-site SEO and producing relevant content optimized for keywords.
It is worth, however, spending time discussing Core Web Vitals with designers and developers so they are aware of these metrics and can begin to adopt practices that improve these scores. Ultimately, cross-functional awareness of Core Web Vitals makes the biggest difference in improving user experience.
Google accesses the field data for Core Web Vitals from a public dataset named the Chrome User Experience Report (CRuX). The data comes from users who opt-in to sync their browsing history and have enabled usage statistic reporting.
A natural question emerges whether Core Web Vitals as measures of user experience are biased towards Chrome users. Since the thresholds are set based on Chrome user data, what does this say about the user experience when visiting websites on other browsers, such as Firefox and Safari? Are Core Web Vitals misrepresenting user experience for Firefox or Safari users by giving good scores in Chrome when, in reality, some users may have a frustrating experience on other browsers?
It’s worth bearing in mind that CRuX is the only publicly available dataset of this nature. If other browsers started producing datasets of this nature, a more well-rounded measure of real-world user experience would be possible. As it is, Google can only work with what’s available. It’s advisable for businesses to figure out their own more encompassing ways to measure UX, such as through Google Analytics, where you can view different metrics based on browsers.
To finish up, bring it back to fundamentals. The reason Core Web Vitals exist is that everyone should care about user experience. As solid approximations of UX based on real-world data, it’s very likely that optimizing these metrics brings tangible business benefits, not just SEO benefits.
