Website page speed can make or break your site. How fast does your website load? Are your images and content optimised for mobile? Industry experts all agree that there is an obvious correlation between page speed and bounce rate, with 53% of mobile users abandoning sites that take over 3 seconds to load. Your page speed is extremely important for keeping people on your website, but with the changes to Google's algorithm this month, your page speed will affect whether people can even find your site in the first place.
Poor performing Core Web Vitals will affect your site's Google Ranking as of May 2021. It's crucial that sites measure and improve UX to meet Google's requirements - especially, those with sites that already rank highly. Without the necessary improvements, you may risk losing your prime ranking position and fading into the oblivion of page two.
Let's Start Off Simple - What are Google Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google uses to assess a websites usability or 'page experience'. It's essentially Google's way of determining how user-friendly your site is from a speed perspective. Core Web Vitals are made up of three (very technical-sounding) page speed and user interaction measurements: largest contentful paint (LCP), first input delay (FID), and cumulative layout shift (CLS).
LCP measures page load performance from the second a page is first opened to the point where the main content on the page has loaded. The ideal page speed is between 0 to 3 seconds. Any speeds longer than 3 seconds will cause your site page to slip into a moderate or poor rating. Put simply, the faster your site loads, the better the score.
FID measures interactivity - in other words, how quickly users are able to interact with your site. There's no use in having a page that loads quickly if users can't interact with it. To provide a good user experience, pages should have an FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
CLS measures visual stability. Ask yourself how often does your site content move? The ideal answer is never. CLS measures page shifts or glitches and works out a CLS score. Pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1 to provide a quality user experience.
So, What Does This Mean for You?
Not sure how your site stacks up? Our team can run a test of your site and analyse the data to make actionable recommendations to improve your Core Web Vital rankings. Need more help with your Google rankings or SEO? Our team can do an analysis of your overall SEO with an SEO audit and help you boost your rankings to get you to the top of the SERPs!