What are Google Web Vitals?

You may have heard about Google Web Vitals, but if you are not in the web design business – why would you?

Consider this: is speed the only thing Google looks out for, or ‘customer experience’ too? Answer is now… the latter.

Google Web Vitals is relatively new, but an extremely important part of your SEO plan.

It’s relatively new, but an extremely important part of your SEO plan.

So what is it ‘Web Vitals’?

Web Vitals are quality signals key to delivering great User Experience (or UX) on the web.
To quote Google: “Optimizing for quality of user experience is key to the long-term success of any site on the web. Whether you’re a business owner, marketer, or developer, Web Vitals can help you quantify the experience of your site and identify opportunities to improve.”

In lamens terms, if the site does not guide the user in the right way, in an easy-to-use way, then the user will likely leave!

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

Google has provided a number of tools over the years to measure and report on performance of your website.  Be it speed, mobile design, statistics and much more.

The Web Vitals initiative aims to simplify the landscape, and help sites focus on the metrics that matter most, the Core Web Vitals.

How do you find out if you are ‘on par’ with what Google wants?

One such method is to use Google Page Speed Insights.  It’s a free page that tests your website’s page score on a number of areas.  One such score of the ‘Largest Meaningful Paint’.  This is the largest image on your site and the time it took for Google to load it.

IGNORE other sites that say your website loaded in 3s, 4s etc.  This is Google saying that this one image too x number of seconds to load for them.  The magic number you want is 2.5s or below for Desktop.

But what about the other new areas?  It’s a brief breakdown on Google Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
• First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

If you are not a designer, but want to get the best results, you should contact an SEO Optimised Website Designer (like us of course) who can check your site to see what the result are.  And if they are not so good, see how they can be resolved.

It’s about user experience… yours any good?

Web Vitals is primarily about the user experience.

How do you check your page speed?

If you visit their website at Google Pagespeed Insights, enter your website address and click Analyse, it animates a little line.
Once it’s done, you get the Page Speed Score for Mobile first, then Desktop (on another tab).
Most websites won’t get above 70 for mobile.  If you do, then you have little to nothing on your homepage!  And content is king.
But for Desktop, you want it to be in the 80s to 90s.  Very few will hit 100, unless again, you have very little on your homepage.  That said, we have some websites that do in fact reach 100.

If you are lower than 60, it’s not great.  If lower than 40, it’s REALLY not great.  We have seen websites with 5-20 for mobile and 20-35 for desktop.  Not a great score.  Often though, there is little reasoning for it.  It’s usually down to a lot of images, and a lot of content for the system to deal with.  Huge menus, and a LOT to load up.  This can all be essential, and sometimes you might just have to live with it.

Website Audit

But if SEO is on your priority list, then it’s best to get it sorted.

If you’d like us to check it, visit our Website Audit page.