Core Web Vitals Update

Google has announced that they will start rolling out a major page experience update throughout this summer 2021, starting in June and completed sometime in August. This update was originally supposed to roll out as early as March 2021, so this delay is good news for many who are not familiar with the page experience update.

If you haven’t heard of this page experience update, which includes Google’s new Core Web Vitals initiative, you’ll want to keep reading.

But before we go on, here are a few of my thoughts about this update and what I expect to be its impact:

1. It’s important to remember that Google is estimated to update its algorithm thousands of times each year. While this is touted as a bigger update, it’s not a novel event. 
2. While the signals are new, what they’re measuring is not. Page experience has long been a concern of Google and those who want to rank well. My guess is that you, as someone who manages a website, have always sought to provide users with a good website experience.
3. And along those same lines… Web administrators will be using a new Page Experience Report in Google Search Console to monitor errors and warnings related to page experience. However, how a web administrator goes about optimizing page experience will largely look like it did pre-update.
4. My guess is that the overall impact of this update will be minimal. That’s not to say we should all ignore our Page Experience Reports and act as if nothing is happening. But it is to say that we shouldn’t treat this like some sort of apocalyptic event for websites.
5. If we want to do well in search, we should always be seeking to create compelling content, build backlinks to our website, and provide users with a stellar experience. This is true now pre-update, and it’s going to be true post-update, too.

If you think that I’m not approaching this seriously enough, let me point you to a recent study on Core Web Vitals released by Searchmetrics that found that only 4% of websites achieved a good Core Web Vitals score (of 2,000,000 analyzed URLs). 

However, as they point out in that same study, this does indicate a great opportunity for websites to get ahead of their competitors.

Alright, I’ll step off my soapbox…

Let’s get to what you need to know about the page experience update and Core Web Vitals.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are essentially a set of signals or metrics that Google is using to measure the user experience of a web page. 

Basically Google realized that there are a ton of metrics for web admins to follow when it comes to user experience. Core Web Vitals is an attempt to “focus on what matters most” when it comes to page experience. In Google’s own words:

Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.

Google has provided a number of tools over the years to measure and report on performance. Some developers are experts at using these tools, while others have found the abundance of both tools and metrics challenging to keep up with.

Site owners should not have to be performance gurus in order to understand the quality of experience they are delivering to 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.

Core Web Vitals currently consists of three parts, although more may be added in the future:

• Largest Contentful Paint measures loading performance. 
• First Input Delay measures how long it takes for a web page to become interactive.
• Cumulative Layout Shift measures the visual stability of a page. 

What is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)?

Largest Contentful Paint measures the loading performance of a website by examining how quickly the largest asset in the viewport, or area above the fold, takes to load. This is the area of the screen that is visible to users without having to scroll. Basically this is Google’s attempt to measure how long it takes the ‘main content’ of a page to load.

A good Largest Contentful Paint score is 2.5 seconds or less. 

How Do I Improve My Largest Contentful Paint Score?

Google says there are four factors that primarily affect Largest Contentful Paint: slow server response times, render blocking Javascript and CSS, resource load times, and client side rendering.

There are a few easy things that we can do to improve the loading performance of our websites. First and foremost, we can choose a reputable hosting provider. If your current hosting plan is ‘cheap.99,’ there’s probably a reason for that low price you’re paying. If you have a Showit website, then you’re all set on this front. The Showit team is constantly looking at ways to optimize the performance of Showit websites on their servers.

Another easy thing to do is to optimize the images and videos on your website. Image optimization—especially those large images in the hero spot of pages—can make a big impact on how quickly a page loads. Krista has shared a tutorial on how we optimize the images on our website.

What is First Input Delay (FID)?

First Input Delay (FID) is a measurement of how long it takes for your site to become interactive. Basically, when your website loads, how quickly can a visitor do something like click a link and that link work?

If you run a test using a tool like GTMetrix, you’ll notice that FID is not able to be measured “in the lab.” However, you can get an idea of FID by measuring Total Blocking Time (TBT). As Google mentions in their page on FID, “Optimizations that improve TBT in the lab should also improve FID for your users.”

A good Total Blocking Time is 300 milliseconds or less.

How do I improve my Total Blocking Time and First Input Delay score?

If you’re on Showit, Squarespace, Wix, or another comparable website building platform, there’s not much you’re going to be able to do on this front. Although if you’re on Showit, you can utilize some of the WordPress tools to help improve the performance of your WordPress blog. 

WordPress users have quite a few tools they can utilize to help improve Total Blocking Time. One of our favorite tools to recommend is WPRocket, which is a caching plugin that helps with speed optimization. It also has features that will reduce the impact of Javascript code, which can help with TBT.

Another tool WordPress users can check out is WP Asset Clean Up, which helps reduce page bloat and ensure pages are only running the code they need to operate.

What is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)?

Cumulative Layout Shift measures the visual stability of a page. If you’ve ever loaded a page and went to click on something only for the page to shift, that would be an example of poor visual stability. Pages that have unexpected shifts in content can expect poorer CLS scores.

A good Cumulative Layout Shift score is 0.1 or less.

How Do I Fix Cumulative Layout Shift Errors?

Showit website users have noted Cumulative Layout Shift errors in Google Search Console. This is due to how Showit renders websites, and Showit has stated they are working to address this issue. Showit has a responsive and hardworking team, so we don’t believe there’s much reason for Showit users to worry about this at the moment. And if that doesn’t satisfy you, consider that Google’s latest Lighthouse release does demonstrate that CLS is weighted relatively low (5%) compared to LCP (25%) and FID (25%) (although they do expect the weight to increase in the future).

There are things that Showit users can do to prevent CLS errors such as limiting the amount of dynamic content on a page. For instance, instead of featuring recent blog posts on your homepage, you might consider statically featuring a few of your favorites instead.

If you’re on WordPress and you’re seeing a Cumulative Layout Shift error on a page, there could be a few reasons why that’s happening. The first thing to examine is any dynamic content on the page. Dynamic content such as ads can throw a CLS error as well as iframes and other embedded content. WPRocket can help with some of these CLS errors.

How do I measure Core Web Vitals on my website?

You can monitor for issues related to Core Web Vitals in the new Page Experience report in Google Search Console. If you haven’t verified your website with Google Search Console, I highly recommend doing that.

Beyond Search Console, there are a number of options for running performance-related tests such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights test. Another favorite is GTMetrix, although it only provides desktop data unless you’re on one of their paid plans (regardless, it’s still one of my go-to tests).

Summary: How do I optimize my Showit website for Core Web Vitals?

The great thing about using a website platform like Showit is that they’re going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. For instance, they’re constantly looking for ways to improve server performance, which can provide both Largest Contentful Paint and First Input Delay improvements.

Additionally, Showit sets up all of their users on a content delivery network (CDN). All files added directly into Showit’s Media Library are already hosted on a CDN (Amazon S3). And for blog uploads, the Showit team automatically tracks user content and determines if moving the WordPress uploads to a CDN is appropriate. If you’re thinking to yourself, “I don’t know what any of this means.” That’s okay because that’s one of the benefits of using—they’re taking care of it.

Image optimization is an improvement many Showit users can make that will often provide a sizable performance boost, especially for users who haven’t ever optimized their images. Showit already compresses images on Showit-side of your website, but this also needs to be done on the WordPress side, too.

The Showit team has already published a number of tips for improving your Core Web Vitals score on your Showit website, which include:

• Reducing 3rd party scripts
• Optimizing images
• Reducing dynamic content
• Reducing the complexity of your website (fewer canvases, elements, fonts, etc.)

Something else Showit and WordPress users can do is to limit the number of plugins on their WordPress blogs.

While Cumulative Layout Shift is a current challenge for Showit websites, there’s no reason to believe that the Showit team won’t be able to address this in a future update. Plus, while CLS might be an error seen “in the lab,” I have yet to experience major CLS issues on a Showit website.

Summary: How do I optimize my WordPress website for Core Web Vitals?

The first step for WordPress websites is examining their hosting set-up to make sure that the provider they’re using is reputable and that there’s nothing about their set-up that’s holding them back. If your website suffers because of your host, implementing most of what follows won’t make much a difference.

Beyond that, WordPress users should consider:

1. Setting up on a Content Delivery Network (CDN) (many hosting providers make this easy to do)
2. Size/Optimize images appropriately
3. Consider adding performance tools to their website like WPRocket and Wp Asset Clean-up.
4. Remove any unnecessary plugins
5. Reduce 3rd party scripts
6. Reduce dynamic content
7. Reduce the complexity of your website

Nothing on either list requires code or much technical knowledge. Optimizing images can be tedious, but is relatively straightforward, especially on WordPress where there are plenty of plugins that can help with this effort.

How will Core Web Vitals influence Google rank?

No one is quite sure yet. I do not believe—especially with the gradual rollout of the update—that the impact will be crazy. As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, Google has cared about user experience for a long time; it has just been measured differently. And this is only one group of signals among hundreds (thousands?) that Google uses to rank websites for a given search. I tend to agree with this opinion from Link Assistant: 

Google says it will use page experience signals as a tie-breaker, in case there are several pages with equally great, relevant content. So, while it’s definitely another thing to worry about, optimizing for the core vitals should not be prioritized over things like quality content, search intent, and page authority.

So where does that leave us?

We’re looking at it as an opportunity to revisit our website’s performance and the user experience we provide visitors. We do think it’s wise to pay attention to this update and the direction being provided by Google. It will become increasingly important to hit these benchmarks, especially as more and more websites improve their scores (which, as we’ve discussed, mostly seem to be… not great). 

However—and I can’t emphasize this enough—I won’t be losing sleep over this.