Google officially released the next Google ranking determining factor called Core Web Vitals. With the release of Core Web Vitals, the hope for 2021 is that there will be algorithm changes announced by Google, such as some details that you should know. In this article, we want to talk about what Core Web Vitals are and what things can affect the ranking?

In the past year, Google made hundreds of changes made. One of the things they do is announce changes in Google’s ranking or ranking factors. Their goal in doing this is when something is important or when they want to encourage people, the webmaster to make changes to their previous site. In other words they do this for important things like HTTPS and other signals.

But not a few people still feel confused when asked what Google ranking signals are like? What can we do to analyze and prepare for it? Come on, look carefully at the explanation below.

What is Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals is a real-world experience metric that Google sees, which answers the following:

• How fast are web pages loading?
• How fast are interactive web pages?
• How fast is the website page stable?

When visitors visit your website pages via mobile devices or via desktop, you can analyze what their experience is like in terms of speed, how fast they can interact with your website pages.

And do you know? Currently, the important Core Web Vitals have joined a group of metrics named by Google as Pages Experience Signals, which are separate from the text on the page. So this signal can be said to be like a cellphone friendly, HTTPS, intrusive introduction which is a pop-up that pops up.

Where this signal is it describes too much of the page text which is a traditional ranking signal, but more about the user experience and what it’s like to use the page and how useful it is to them. This is of course a very important factor in cell phones when sometimes the speed is not that high. So this kind of matrix is ​​what Google measures.

Will This Affect Ranking?

Of course, Core Web Vitals will affect all search results from regular searches, mobile to desktop based on certain criteria. The most important thing is that this core web will be the criteria for being able to appear on Google Top Stories. These are news results that usually appear at the top of the Google search engine.

As we know previously, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is one of the requirements to appear in the Top Stories. But AMP will be eliminated by Google. So you still have to meet the requirements for regular Google News inclusion, but AMP will no longer be a requirement to appear in Top Stories. But you must meet the Core Web Vitals minimum threshold.

Of course this is the most important point. And this of course has the potential to affect a lot of the resulting rankings.

When will that happen?

As we explained earlier, Google has announced that this will happen around 2021. Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, Google has pushed for the release of Core Web Vitals in algorithmic form first, and they will give it time. additionally for webmasters to get ready. So whenever Google announces a ranking factor change, the big question is:

How Many Changes Will Occur?

The real question for Core Web Vitals is how much should you worry about this metric and how big a result we will see in Google’s SERP changes? You need to remember, that Google has hundreds of ranking signals. So the impact of a single signal is usually not very good. That said if your website is terrible at some of these matrices it can make a difference.

If you are in a very competitive environment, competing with people for very competitive terms will certainly make a difference. So it probably won’t be a big deal based on past experience with other ranking signals, and you might want to fix especially if you’re doing really badly.

Another thing you need to consider is that some Google signals have a bigger impact than their actual ranking factors. As with page speed, the signal generated may be quite small, but when users experience it it can have a huge impact. A Google study also shows that for pages that meet the Core Web Vitals threshold, visitors are 24% less likely to leave your website.

Therefore, even without Core Web Vitals being an official Google ranking factor, it will still be important as it will provide a better user experience. 24% is like getting 24% more traffic without doing anything, just by making your website a little more useful.

Three Signals for Core Web Vitals

With the three signals below, we want to tell you about how to measure, identify problems and fix things that if you think something is wrong. What are the three signals?

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The first signal is named largest contentful paint (LCP). The layman’s term calls it how fast the page loads? In this case, it is greatly influenced by the rendering time, images, videos, largest text and so on.

Google will pay more attention to the little things, whether it be desktop pages or mobile pages, the biggest content, whether it be images, videos or text, how fast does it take to access the page? It’s really that simple! This of course is affected by your server time, your CSS, Javascript, client-side rendering, and so on.

2. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

The second signal is the cumulative layout shift (CLS). Google is asking the following question, how fast is the page stable? We are sure, we all have an experience where we have loaded a page on our mobile, we go to click a button and at the last second we will shift and will hit something else or something in the page layout that has an unexpected layout shift. And it turns out to be a bad user experience, you know!

So that’s what Google measures by cumulative layout shift. How fast is everything stable? The reason things are unstable is because the image sizes are often not found. So if you have an image that is 400 pixels wide and high, then it needs to be defined in HTML.

That’s a bad user experience. So that’s what Google measures by cumulative layout shift. How fast is everything stable? The number one reason that things are unstable is because the image size is often not specified. So if you have an image and a width and height of 400 pixels, it needs to be defined in HTML. There are other reasons too, like animation and things like that.

3. First Input Delay (FID) 

The third signal in the Core Web Vitals metric is the first input delay (FID). basically many ask how fast the page is interactive? When a user clicks on something, how quickly can the browser start processing it and produce the result?

Obviously it’s not a good experience when you click on something and nothing happens or it’s really slow. So that’s what Google measures. This can depend on your website’s JavaScript, third-party code, and there are various ways to dig in and fix it.

How to Measure & Improve It

This is the time for you to focus on what really matters. If you have a problem, how do you measure your performance with Core Web Vitals, and how do you fix the problem? Google has made it very, very easy to find.

The first thing you want to do is search Search Console. They have new reports there like Core Web Vitals. They will tell you all your URLs that are in their index, whether they are bad, need to be improved, or good.

If you have bad URLs or need upgrading, that’s when you want to investigate and find out what went wrong and how you can improve those pages. Each report in Search Console is linked to a report on Page Speed ​​Insights. This might be the number one tool you will want to use to diagnose your problem with Core Web Vitals. It can be powered by Lighthouse, Google’s suite of performance metrics tools.

Conclusion

With the existence of Core Web Vitals, of course, answers all user questions about how fast the website pages load? How fast are interactive web pages? And how fast is the website page stable?

In short, Core Web Vitals has more than six months left. You have to get ready from now on! At least take a minimal dive and see how your site is performing and see if you can find some convenience to speed up your site speed. In order for the performance and performance of your website to remain stable even though the traffic is high, you can use hosting from HostForLIFE.

Thus the article this time, hopefully it’s useful! Happy reading!