Web Vitals – Google’s factors for the user experience of a website

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important to the overall user experience of a website. The Core Web Vitals are comprised of three specific measures of page speed and user interaction: greatest satisfying color, delay on first input, and cumulative layout shift.
In short, the Core WebVitals are a subset of factors that are part of Google’s evaluation of “page experience” (basically Google’s way of evaluating the overall UX of your site).

Overview

Web-Vitals is a Google initiative to provide consistent guidance around quality signals, which is essential for a great user experience on the web.
Over the years, Google has provided a number of tools to measure and report on performance. Some developers are experts in using these tools, while others have found the abundance of both tools and metrics challenging to keep up with.
Website owners don’t need to be performance gurus to understand the quality of the experience they offer their users. The Web Vitals initiative aims to simplify the landscape and help sites focus on the metrics that matter most, the Core Web Vitals.

Central web visual elements

Core web vitals are the subset of web vitals that apply to all websites, should be measured by every website owner and will show up in all Google tools. Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a specific facet of the user experience and reflects the actual user experience of a critical outcome.
The core web vitals consist of various metrics that will evolve over time. In 2020, the current set focuses on three different aspects of the user experience – load, interactivity and visual stability:
– Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures the charging power. To ensure a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of the page first starting to load.
– First Input Delay (FID): measures the interactivity. To ensure a good user experience, the pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
– Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To ensure a good user experience, the pages should have a CLS of less than 0.1.
To ensure you’re hitting the recommended target for each of the above metrics for most of your users, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page load segmented by mobile and desktop devices.
Tools that assess compliance with Core Web Vitals should consider a site to have passed if it meets the recommended targets in the 75th percentile.

How do you measure Core Web Vitals?

We’ve found that these metrics can be just as important as a well-executed SEO campaign, so how are they measured? Since Google considers core web vitals to be the backbone of the user experience, the company has committed to providing tools to measure them. Below are three ways to measure website performance in terms of key web vitals.
Google collects anonymized, real user experiences for each central web criterion with the Chrome User Experience Report. This is useful as it means that external applications do not have to be set up in advance. In fact, Google has already taken care of this in advance. Plus, tools like PageSpeed Insights run on the same platform, which means you can start using them right away.
While this method is relatively straightforward and requires little input from you, the analysis it provides is not very detailed. Among other things, it neglects the telemetry per side view. This would help someone to accurately diagnose potential problems with a website.

Use of JavaScript

Alternatively, you can use JavaScript to get to grips with the most important web vitals. The easiest way to get started is to simply call the JavaScript entry in its library for Web Vitals. This provides ready-to-use web APIs that are accurate. In addition, the Chrome Web Store offers an extension called the Chrome Extension for Web Vitals, which allows you to report on any Web Vital without having to write code.
Finally, you can use lab tools to measure each of the key web vitals. This is particularly helpful for those who want to get an idea of the performance of a website before it is launched. However, this does not mean that field metrics can be neglected. A user’s experience is influenced by a variety of factors. Examples of this are network conditions and additional programs that can run on the user’s side. Therefore, it is in your best interest to take advantage of field testing tools as soon as your website is up and running. It’s an easy way to make sure everything is in order.