Keep visitors engaged with Core Web Vitals

Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance of what is essential for a great user experience on the web.

Core Web Vitals are three metrics from Web Vitals. When a site meets Core Web Vitals, research showed that people were 24% less likely to abandon the page.

Core Web Vitals focuses on

• Loading
• Interactivity
• Visual stability

Collecting data is the first step towards improving your Core Web Vitals.

• PageSpeed Insights measures and reports on the user experience of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how to improve your pages.
  
  
• Search Console measures and reports on how your pages meet Core Web Vitals, based on how your audience uses your site
  
  
• Web Vitals Chrome extension measures and reports Core Web Vitals performance in real time for any page, and is best for developers

💡Best practice: Share suggestions from any of these tools with your developer.

Fast loading times reassure your audience that the page is useful.

• 50% of people leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load
• 47% expect web pages to load in under two seconds
• 52% say load time plays a role in how loyal they are to a brand

Loading is measured by largest contentful paint (LCP), which is how long it takes to display the largest image or text block.

To meet Core Web Vitals, 75% of your pages should load in 2.5 seconds or fewer.

💡Best practices

• Enable lazy loading
• Use videos instead of large GIFs
• Remove unused code

While Loading measures how fast your site displays content, Interactivity measures how responsive your site is when your audience tries to select an article or take another action.

Interactivity is measured by first input delay (FID), which is how long it takes from when someone clicks a link or button to when your site begins processing their action.

To meet Core Web Vitals, 75% of your pages should take 0.1 seconds or fewer to start processing a click.

💡Best practices

• Enable lazy loading, which splits code into smaller tasks
• Load code needed for the page first
• Reduce code that fetches data

Have you ever started reading an article, and before finishing a sentence, the text moves and you lose your place?

Most of the time it’s just annoying, but sometimes, it can cause real damage.

Visual stability is measured by cumulative layout shift (CLS), the highest number of content shifts that happen at once.

To meet Core Web Vitals, 75% of your pages should score 0.1 or less.

💡Best practices

• Set the aspect ratios or dimensions for images and videos
• Choose the most likely ad size based on previous ads

Avoid ads that display at the very top of a page