Understanding Core Web Vitals

For those who work in the digital marketing industry, you may have heard the phrase ‘Core Web Vitals’ being thrown around for years now. You’d be forgiven for not looking too much into them, but times have changed and now understanding their importance is vital to ensure your site is ranking and performing as well as it can. Fortunately, here at Peaky Digital, we have a team of SEO experts who are well-versed in Core Web Vitals and therefore can help you understand them too. 

What are Core Web Vitals?

To truly understand the importance of your site performing well in its Core Web Vitals test, you will first need to understand what it is they are and what is being tested. The aim of Core Web Vitals is to evaluate a website’s performance when it comes to providing a strong user experience. 

The three main performance metrics being measured are site loading speed, interactivity and visual stability. These can be broken down more specifically to:

• LCP – Largest Contentful Paint. This is the measurement of the time it takes for the largest content element to become visible.
• FID – First Input Delay. This measures a page’s responsiveness during loading. 
• CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift. This measures the sum total of all individual layout shift scores for every unexpected layout shift.

You may now be thinking – how do I go about seeing how my site scores? We would recommend using free tools such as Chrome User Experience Report and Screaming Frog. These allow you to input your desired URL and it will run the appropriate tests and ultimately provide you with insights. It is at this point that you may need to take action to address these issues. Lighthouse is a great Google Chrome Extension which identifies where your site is lacking and then provides you with the foundations to begin improving the user experience of your website. 

Why are Core Web Vitals so important?

Page speed is now a ranking factor. This is why scoring well in your Core Web Vitals test is so important. It was previously identified that mobile speed was a ranking factor, and should still be treated as the most important of the two (desktop and mobile), but now overall website page speed is a ranking factor. There are many things you can do to improve your site’s page speed, but one of the most popular is ensuring your site is built in a recognised site builder, such as WordPress or Shopify. This is because they are likely to update and adapt their CMS in order to improve performance as and when Google releases updates. 

Improve your site’s performance when you enlist the help of the experts

Peaky Digital’s team is full of technical SEO specialists dedicated to helping our clients achieve success online.

If you’re looking to optimise your website – or want to find out more about our digital marketing services – we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us today for a chat!